The self-driving car almost running over hoses thing? That's a problem. The obvious answer to me is an emergency stop button mounted on the hood behind glass like fire alarms have.
I took a ride in a Cruise self-driving car. I used the Cruise app, told it where to pick me up and where to drop me off, and then a car showed up. I used the app to unlock the doors and then got in, and then got to my destination, in awe. There are ton of nits I could pick about the trip, and it was a bit contrived because I'm not in the service area, but holy shit I got from point A to point B without a driver in the car and it wasn't a ride at Disneyland.
I'm sure there will continue to be growing pains. Uber killing the bicyclist is simply terrible. My un-expert opinion is it'll take years longer to arrive, but the self-driving car future is coming, ever so slowly.
> In another incident, a Cruise car entered an area where firefighters were working and nearly ran over their hoses – it only stopped when firefighters shattered the front window of the vehicle.
How is this not on YouTube?
Instead of the hood button, I think everyone should just carry one of those little windshield shattering hammers on their keychains. It'd save on red buttons, and improve survivability of water-related automobile accidents.
As someone who commuted by motorcycle in SF for several years, I have a hard time imagining any barely-competent self-driving car being worse than those maniacs in the Yellow Cabs.
In SF/Oakland, so many non-cabs run red lights all the time. While cabs are typically the most aggressive drivers anywhere in the world, we have a problem of lawlessness in SF. This is becoming a culture. An accepted culture, precisely because of lack of enforcement by police and lack of will to enforce laws, voted in by the population that is enamored by ostensible "kindness".
The whole thing is bizarre. No red light cameras. Not many cops interested in pursuing speeders. Not enough cops, actually.
I'll bite.
Fines and fees are a difficult topic.
Fines and fees should never be used to fund the government.
They are a perverse incentive.
We have seen over the years how horrible politicians try to "lower taxes" by shifting the cost of running a town to people who can't fight back.
For traffic management, I like the idea of roundabouts and twists to control speed better. Red lights and stop signs have inherent deficiencies and we should phase them out. I'd argue that drivers should feel they are going to fast and need to slow down by cues like narrow streets with no onstreet parking, not four lane stroads with 30mph plastered on a five mile perfectly straight stretch.
Most importantly though, we need better public transit or any public transit. Ideally free of cost for the riders and paid for by taxes.
Roundabouts and public transit improvements cost millions or billions and take years or decades to roll out. They’re great, and we should build them, but there’s a lot to be said for quicker, cheaper solutions in the mean time.
It is a pathetic commentary on our society that we can't implement roundabouts without spending millions of dollars and a decade of time. I feel that an intersection could be replaced with a roundabout in a single weekend if people cared enough. Didn't the Japanese recently reroute tracks and reconfigure a train station overnight, before the 7 AM train arrived?
At some point this attitude has to be given up. There's no reason traffic circles should cost millions to billions. I'd be willing to wager that this short sighted, quick and dirty meantime fix strategy has been employed too much and now we've arrived at this reality.
It’s not an “attitude”, it’s an objective fact about how capital project go in the US right now.
I’ve got theories, but I don’t really know what the best way is to fix that. We probably need to try a bunch of things, and I’m all for that.
But drivers running red lights kill people. I’m for for the ideal, elegant solutions, and also for the imperfect incremental ones. I really don’t think worse-is-better, if that’s what you’re advocating, is appropriate.
Strange. Traffic tickets are one of the best ways to diverge money from the elite to the poor.
How can any self proclaimed leftist be against it?
There are tons of rich douchebags in California with supercars.
And even more if you moved to income based tickets. That is ticket would be fraction of your income. For red light let's say 1 week. Minus some value that is sufficient for poverty level living.
Because the leftists with a brain have enough space in there to recall that it doesn't work that way in practice and just becomes another avenue for the .gov to screw a few more bucks out of whoever can't fight back.
Traffic laws if enforced uniformly would be massively unpopular and get changed. You might be able to get people to bend over and take it like they do in Europe but you'd have to boil the frog for a couple hundred years to get to a state where that's culturally acceptable in the US. Traffic laws enforced discretionarily just become an expensive wheeled version of stop and frisk but with a pretext that makes them constitutional which is not good for society. The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy. Of course there are places where improvement can be made but such opportunity is mostly incremental.
> The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy.
This allows for oppression via selective enforcement and is absolutely a jackboot fantasy.
Which is better than the same thing but with bigger teeth and in more places, which is exactly what happens when you take the jackboot fantasy and try and implement it anywhere other than textbook magic land.
The solution to the fact that minor civil infractions are potentially ruinous to the poor and that the cops prowl the neighborhoods of the powerless looking for revenue for the state isn't to implement those things everywhere.
How do traffic tickets help the poor? They are more useful for punishing the poor significantly while being fairly inconsequential to the rich. They don't scale to your income level.
The truly poor don't even own a car. They're desperately trying to cross the street before getting run over. They're relying on public transit if it even exists to get anywhere.
You know where the truly poor come from? They come from the "slightly better off poor".
Creating a potentially ruinous expense that will occasionally be used to occasionally knock people in the latter group down to the former is anything but progressive and probably not good from a societal POV.
I once had to defend myself against an automated red light ticket from a car I did not own, with a driver of a different ethnicity and race than me on a day when I could prove I was not in the country. I've never lived in SF.
From what I can tell, that wing of the SF court house is administered by crooks.
My experiences with SFPD have been mostly fine, but I'd pop open some bubbly if I heard the court house was razed by a frustrated real estate developer.
A red light ticket is $500. At that price point, the value prop is really poor. It does not improve safety or improve compliance proportional to the ticket price. It just makes everyone mad.
It's a well known phenomenon that when cops don't like the people in the office of prosecutor, DA, or other similar positions the police will cease enforcing laws so they can shout about how crime is on the rise in order to get their way.
If you follow the Prop link, the article says that the state of california reduced theft under that amount to a misdemeanour because there wasn't enough room in prisons to keep people arrested for it.
Quite a different motivation than SF decriminalizing things
It was a ballot proposition. That was the stated reasoning of its proponents but assigning motivation for why a referendum came out the way it did is a fools errand. The actual reasons why millions of people voted the way they did will invariably be multi-causal and include things no one in their right mind would consider condensed down to one “Yes” vote.
I remember that vote, and crowding in the prisons wasn’t even a consideration for how I voted because if we wanted to resolve that issue we would build more prisons; therefore it was a useless justification in either direction. In truth, the sum of our choices in California does not make it look like we care about crowding in the prisons, only that we care about looking like we care. It’s been more than 15 years since the first time I read an article about how our prisons are overcrowded, and they’re still overcrowded.
Because you either stop prosecuting people or you build more prisons, or you stop pretending to care one way or the other about how crowded the existing prisons are.
Even if you think there’s some measure of criminal justice reform that could be done to reduce the headcount in the future in the State of California’s prison system, you build the damn prisons now to address specifically: overcrowding in the prisons, and then if some future opportunity arises to raze some of the older prisons because they are no longer needed because the prison population has been reduced, then you do that. Or you don’t, and we haven’t, so that’s clearly what our choice is: not caring in the abstract. Given that, I have no patience for the people that pretend otherwise.
I hear this one a lot, but it's not "decriminalization". Prop 47 reduced theft under $950 to a misdemeanor from a felony. A misdemeanor is not decriminalization! Not even close. You can go to jail for a misdemeanor.
This is actually pretty normal nationwide (and also a rather conservatively low dollar number.) Fun fact: Did you know Texas' limit, yes texas, is $2500?
I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime and is more of a red herring and distraction. The real reason is a mix of ineffective policing (which is a product of both police being bad at their job and police being afraid to do their job because of ill will towards them) and ineffective prosecution.
Those problems have led to what feels like a "decriminalization" of theft, but that's not the law's problem. I promise you, SF would still be having these problems if this law didn't exist. (Hell, the highly publicized daylight ransacking of the Louis Vutton in Union Square shows how this law is irrelevant. Very few things in that store are under $950!)
>> I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime
I don't have anything empirical but in my experience the frequency and brazenness of the shoplifting (in SF) increased in a very noticeable way soon after the passage of Prop 47.
The one place you do see a dramatic impact is car break ins. But even that is a result of a broken relationship between the DA's office and the SFPD. The fact is, the SFPD is shitty at it's job (close rates are comically low, its understaffed, heaving demoralized) and the DA doesn't have people to prosecute.
There is only one set of stats that matters here: crashes, fatalities, incidents etc per km compared to similar journeys. Everything else is bullshit and emotion and politics.
I think that’s a rather narrow accounting of all the possible costs. Stopping the flow of traffic can be very costly.
It’s a balancing act: you do want to maximize the economic benefits of the technology, and on the other hand you do want to minimize the costs to society.
If a person stops in the middle of a road, other people talk to that person, and typically learn what's going on and can help work on resolving it. Are they having a heart attack? Do they need people to push the car? Are they having a road rage incident? Are they a jerk who needs to run into a store and picked the wrong place to stop temporarily to do it? Even if the situation can't be solved, the ability to communicate (or the implication of not being able to communicate) gives predictable, human-friendly feedback which can be shared with emergency services and other people.
The self-driving car could save many more lives by simply not moving at all from its parking spot, except in cases of medical emergency or imminent threat to life mitigated only by moving.
The economy might be improved somewhat by personal vehicular mobility, but we’re talking about human lives.
A lot of people (including replies to my root comment) seem to take a puritanical rather than a pragmatic view: if a self driving car makes any mistakes at all, that's too many. Even if the human driver it replaces is much worse and will make many more (and more serious) errors should they not be replaced...
Humans are generally viewed to have an inherent right -- or at least a strong imperative -- to fully participate in society. Restricting a human's right or privilege to do something typically carries a higher burden than simply asking whether the thing they are doing is a net positive/negative. Over the last 100 years the layout of cities and countries reflects an expectation that full participation in society requires access to transportation. While driving is not an absolute right and we subject drivers to certain minimum requirements (licensing and sometimes periodic relicensing, insurance, various laws that apply to conduct in a motor vehicle), the presumption is basically to create a pathway that allows people to drive.
Driving creates a danger and a number of costly externalities. Those are the costs side of the cost-benefit equation. It may be the case that AI drivers have generally lower costs because of your assertion that they make fewer mistakes or less grave mistakes than humans. This does not lead to the obvious inference that allowing an AI driver today in a particular place under a particular regime of rules confers a benefit equal to allowing a human to drive.
In the same way, for instance, we do not generally pass laws or policies against people having children, even if we recognize that some people are suboptimal or unfit parents. Instead we presume fitness and build in some checks to capture excessively unfit parenting later. Whatever the cost of suboptimal parenting, we recognize the choice or ability to have a child to be a part of basic human dignity, and so the benefits outweigh the costs. Many jurisdictions place more onerous requirements on pet ownership than human ownership even if the downside cost of being a negligent pet owner is less bad than being a negligent parent.
Perhaps the calculus will be different when AI driving is costless and ubiquitous; we might decide collectively that humans have no inherent right to manually operate vehicles and full participation in society does not require them to. But in the mean time, holding AI driver street tests to a higher standard than human drivers can be justified strictly on a cost-benefit (and thus pragmatic) basis.
You might counter that, well, AI driving tests don't provide a benefit now, but given a particular utility function, the testing offers <x> marginal training value towards a future reduction in costs (in terms of injury/delay/death). But then it depends on your discount factor of the present versus the future, which is a socially determined function.
There's also an underlying presumption that there's some elasticity of resource allocation. Perhaps allocating $x million towards AI driving reduces deaths or injuries or delays; but people can readily contest that $x million spent on other options could do so more efficiently (perhaps infrastructural investment in public transit, perhaps additional free driver's training, perhaps more robust emergency services, perhaps safety features). Because much of this investment is occurring in the private sector, people rely on the state's regulation of these efforts to incentivize allocating resources towards preferred investments. This is also pragmatic, rather than puritanical.
It's fine to disagree or have a more bullish view of AI driving, or to feel these concerns are overrated, but it makes very little sense to characterize them as puritanical (in contrast to pragmatic). Some people may have puritanical views, just as some proponents of the technology may have messianic views. But both positions can be justified entirely from rational argument depending on one's utility function. Why strawman?
You are a really uncharitable poster here. Your first intervention is to dismiss anyone who disagree with you about which metrics are most useful as "bullshit" and "emotional" and here you call them puritans. I think you should engage in some self-reflection and try to approach conversation online in a le...
I think good question is that are the kilometers driven same?
That is is the self-driven same set as human driven? Without any exclusions. And if not are the ones exluded and including accidents included in self-driving?
For example, consider if drunk driving is common, and lots of people get into accidents because of that. Then a self-driving car might do better than a drunk driver statistically. But then, what if you are not a drunk driver? Then you might personally drive safer than any self-driving car.
A more realistic example could be that 65% of routes are safer in a self-driving car, but then your personal commuting route might be in the remaining 35%.
Or for example one might look at accidents caused chiefly by inattention and assume that a self-driving car would perform better in those situations. But then, you have the unknown quantity of complex situations where a self-driving car will cause an accident due to not being able to understand its environment.
There isn't really a way to condense the discussion to a single statistic without being disingenuous.
>A more realistic example could be that 65% of routes are safer in a self-driving car, but then your personal commuting route might be in the remaining 35%.
This is a good example, I think it will be the reality of any change like this. But that is sort of my point: Someone will always lose out. That's the price of things getting better for everyone else. And that's that standard we should judge all changes on: do we do more good for more people than we do bad by making this change? Then perhaps you can re-distribute.
That's what I am asking for here. If self-driving cars prevent 10 people dying down town but cause 5 to die up town, that's a good deal because 10>5. The fact it's a bad deal for those 5 people does not mean it is not a good deal for society as a whole...
Personally, I am not a big fun of utilitarianism.
Reducing deaths is fine obviously, but switching modes of death with the excuse that it reduces fatalities overall is in my opinion morally questionable.
I won't pretend utilitarianism is perfect, but I don't think we have much option. If we take the "no new problems" extreme alternative then you get worse and stranger results: Seatbelts would never have been legal since while they save 1000s of lives a day, they also occasionally kill people who would otherwise survive...
In case of a "trolley problem[1]", you will not switch the track and will let the tram run over 10 workers instead of 1, because the tram is already on its way. Right?
> which have blocked traffic and hampered emergency services
Like, if the only stats that matter are road accidents, the obvious thing would be to just ban all motorised vehicles. A slightly more nuanced view is perhaps required.
Driving home the other night an empty Cruise car with no driver was stopped in the center lane on Fell street. A little off center in the lane with no hazard lights on.
Does Cruise have remote operators that are watching for weird stuff and can take some manual intervention from afar?
Like someone to remotely turn on the hazards and to dispatch a person to go move it if it’s malfunctioning.
I’m very pro self driving cars but obviously there are some “bugs” to work out still.
Bring them to Austin, TX, we aren't afraid of technology. I would take a bet anytime that on average these are far more safe and less apt to wreck than the average driver here; drivers here are awful.
All the examples of bad interactions are from Cruise, not Waymo.
So maybe restrict Cruise? Or allow expansion only for companies that show excellency? In my opinion that would be a shame to prevent good implementations from being used because of the existence of bad implementations from competitors.
I think the bigger concern here is how fast and loose GM/Cruise got approval to run all this alongside deploying Super Cruise to normal customers in their normal vehicles.
I reaaaaaaally don't trust GM's autonomous literally anywhere seeing the Cruise debacle. But hey, they're the American carmaker, so they got a free pass from the government to run wreckfully.
It's annoying in self driving artcles to see Cruise and Tesla grouped together with Waymo. The authors either dont realize how far ahead Waymo is or think it would somehow be improper to point it out.
>All examples of bad interactions are from Cruise, not Waymo
In this article, sure. However, Waymo is certainly not without incident in SF, especially recently (article below is from 1/24/23)...
>A Waymo autonomous vehicle was apparently stopped in the middle of a key San Francisco intersection, bringing traffic to a halt during morning rush hour.
Does the local government have any leverage over a firm that's causing issues on the road? Beyond individual ticketing I mean. Like if Uber is causing issues, what legal standing does SF have to prevent them from doing so?
Doing drive testing of self-driving cars on public roads is always a risk, but lots of other entities cause road issues.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI took a ride in a Cruise self-driving car. I used the Cruise app, told it where to pick me up and where to drop me off, and then a car showed up. I used the app to unlock the doors and then got in, and then got to my destination, in awe. There are ton of nits I could pick about the trip, and it was a bit contrived because I'm not in the service area, but holy shit I got from point A to point B without a driver in the car and it wasn't a ride at Disneyland.
I'm sure there will continue to be growing pains. Uber killing the bicyclist is simply terrible. My un-expert opinion is it'll take years longer to arrive, but the self-driving car future is coming, ever so slowly.
How is this not on YouTube?
Instead of the hood button, I think everyone should just carry one of those little windshield shattering hammers on their keychains. It'd save on red buttons, and improve survivability of water-related automobile accidents.
The whole thing is bizarre. No red light cameras. Not many cops interested in pursuing speeders. Not enough cops, actually.
Don't ride a motorcycle here.
For traffic management, I like the idea of roundabouts and twists to control speed better. Red lights and stop signs have inherent deficiencies and we should phase them out. I'd argue that drivers should feel they are going to fast and need to slow down by cues like narrow streets with no onstreet parking, not four lane stroads with 30mph plastered on a five mile perfectly straight stretch.
Most importantly though, we need better public transit or any public transit. Ideally free of cost for the riders and paid for by taxes.
I’ve got theories, but I don’t really know what the best way is to fix that. We probably need to try a bunch of things, and I’m all for that.
But drivers running red lights kill people. I’m for for the ideal, elegant solutions, and also for the imperfect incremental ones. I really don’t think worse-is-better, if that’s what you’re advocating, is appropriate.
Perhaps it would be better if all of the fines went into a social wealth fund that every citizen has a share in?
Fines should be used to fund insurance for victims of lawless drivers, or to improve road infrastructure, build bicycle roads, etc.
Traffic laws if enforced uniformly would be massively unpopular and get changed. You might be able to get people to bend over and take it like they do in Europe but you'd have to boil the frog for a couple hundred years to get to a state where that's culturally acceptable in the US. Traffic laws enforced discretionarily just become an expensive wheeled version of stop and frisk but with a pretext that makes them constitutional which is not good for society. The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy. Of course there are places where improvement can be made but such opportunity is mostly incremental.
This allows for oppression via selective enforcement and is absolutely a jackboot fantasy.
The solution to the fact that minor civil infractions are potentially ruinous to the poor and that the cops prowl the neighborhoods of the powerless looking for revenue for the state isn't to implement those things everywhere.
Creating a potentially ruinous expense that will occasionally be used to occasionally knock people in the latter group down to the former is anything but progressive and probably not good from a societal POV.
From what I can tell, that wing of the SF court house is administered by crooks.
My experiences with SFPD have been mostly fine, but I'd pop open some bubbly if I heard the court house was razed by a frustrated real estate developer.
Quite a different motivation than SF decriminalizing things
I remember that vote, and crowding in the prisons wasn’t even a consideration for how I voted because if we wanted to resolve that issue we would build more prisons; therefore it was a useless justification in either direction. In truth, the sum of our choices in California does not make it look like we care about crowding in the prisons, only that we care about looking like we care. It’s been more than 15 years since the first time I read an article about how our prisons are overcrowded, and they’re still overcrowded.
Even if you think there’s some measure of criminal justice reform that could be done to reduce the headcount in the future in the State of California’s prison system, you build the damn prisons now to address specifically: overcrowding in the prisons, and then if some future opportunity arises to raze some of the older prisons because they are no longer needed because the prison population has been reduced, then you do that. Or you don’t, and we haven’t, so that’s clearly what our choice is: not caring in the abstract. Given that, I have no patience for the people that pretend otherwise.
This is actually pretty normal nationwide (and also a rather conservatively low dollar number.) Fun fact: Did you know Texas' limit, yes texas, is $2500?
I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime and is more of a red herring and distraction. The real reason is a mix of ineffective policing (which is a product of both police being bad at their job and police being afraid to do their job because of ill will towards them) and ineffective prosecution.
Those problems have led to what feels like a "decriminalization" of theft, but that's not the law's problem. I promise you, SF would still be having these problems if this law didn't exist. (Hell, the highly publicized daylight ransacking of the Louis Vutton in Union Square shows how this law is irrelevant. Very few things in that store are under $950!)
I don't have anything empirical but in my experience the frequency and brazenness of the shoplifting (in SF) increased in a very noticeable way soon after the passage of Prop 47.
http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/images/screen_shot_2021-06-...
The one place you do see a dramatic impact is car break ins. But even that is a result of a broken relationship between the DA's office and the SFPD. The fact is, the SFPD is shitty at it's job (close rates are comically low, its understaffed, heaving demoralized) and the DA doesn't have people to prosecute.
Pickpocketing has just become a job. There are still fines but the gangs just write them off as business expenses. It's ridiculous.
It’s a balancing act: you do want to maximize the economic benefits of the technology, and on the other hand you do want to minimize the costs to society.
SF and likely most cities will have others such as how disruptive you are.
People rarely stop in the middle of a road, even with emergency services need to pass and refuse to move.
How rarely? How does it compare to self driving cars per km driven?
The economy might be improved somewhat by personal vehicular mobility, but we’re talking about human lives.
Driving creates a danger and a number of costly externalities. Those are the costs side of the cost-benefit equation. It may be the case that AI drivers have generally lower costs because of your assertion that they make fewer mistakes or less grave mistakes than humans. This does not lead to the obvious inference that allowing an AI driver today in a particular place under a particular regime of rules confers a benefit equal to allowing a human to drive.
In the same way, for instance, we do not generally pass laws or policies against people having children, even if we recognize that some people are suboptimal or unfit parents. Instead we presume fitness and build in some checks to capture excessively unfit parenting later. Whatever the cost of suboptimal parenting, we recognize the choice or ability to have a child to be a part of basic human dignity, and so the benefits outweigh the costs. Many jurisdictions place more onerous requirements on pet ownership than human ownership even if the downside cost of being a negligent pet owner is less bad than being a negligent parent.
Perhaps the calculus will be different when AI driving is costless and ubiquitous; we might decide collectively that humans have no inherent right to manually operate vehicles and full participation in society does not require them to. But in the mean time, holding AI driver street tests to a higher standard than human drivers can be justified strictly on a cost-benefit (and thus pragmatic) basis.
You might counter that, well, AI driving tests don't provide a benefit now, but given a particular utility function, the testing offers <x> marginal training value towards a future reduction in costs (in terms of injury/delay/death). But then it depends on your discount factor of the present versus the future, which is a socially determined function.
There's also an underlying presumption that there's some elasticity of resource allocation. Perhaps allocating $x million towards AI driving reduces deaths or injuries or delays; but people can readily contest that $x million spent on other options could do so more efficiently (perhaps infrastructural investment in public transit, perhaps additional free driver's training, perhaps more robust emergency services, perhaps safety features). Because much of this investment is occurring in the private sector, people rely on the state's regulation of these efforts to incentivize allocating resources towards preferred investments. This is also pragmatic, rather than puritanical.
It's fine to disagree or have a more bullish view of AI driving, or to feel these concerns are overrated, but it makes very little sense to characterize them as puritanical (in contrast to pragmatic). Some people may have puritanical views, just as some proponents of the technology may have messianic views. But both positions can be justified entirely from rational argument depending on one's utility function. Why strawman?
You are a really uncharitable poster here. Your first intervention is to dismiss anyone who disagree with you about which metrics are most useful as "bullshit" and "emotional" and here you call them puritans. I think you should engage in some self-reflection and try to approach conversation online in a le...
That is is the self-driven same set as human driven? Without any exclusions. And if not are the ones exluded and including accidents included in self-driving?
For example, consider if drunk driving is common, and lots of people get into accidents because of that. Then a self-driving car might do better than a drunk driver statistically. But then, what if you are not a drunk driver? Then you might personally drive safer than any self-driving car.
A more realistic example could be that 65% of routes are safer in a self-driving car, but then your personal commuting route might be in the remaining 35%.
Or for example one might look at accidents caused chiefly by inattention and assume that a self-driving car would perform better in those situations. But then, you have the unknown quantity of complex situations where a self-driving car will cause an accident due to not being able to understand its environment.
There isn't really a way to condense the discussion to a single statistic without being disingenuous.
This is a good example, I think it will be the reality of any change like this. But that is sort of my point: Someone will always lose out. That's the price of things getting better for everyone else. And that's that standard we should judge all changes on: do we do more good for more people than we do bad by making this change? Then perhaps you can re-distribute.
That's what I am asking for here. If self-driving cars prevent 10 people dying down town but cause 5 to die up town, that's a good deal because 10>5. The fact it's a bad deal for those 5 people does not mean it is not a good deal for society as a whole...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
> which have blocked traffic and hampered emergency services
Like, if the only stats that matter are road accidents, the obvious thing would be to just ban all motorised vehicles. A slightly more nuanced view is perhaps required.
Does Cruise have remote operators that are watching for weird stuff and can take some manual intervention from afar?
Like someone to remotely turn on the hazards and to dispatch a person to go move it if it’s malfunctioning.
I’m very pro self driving cars but obviously there are some “bugs” to work out still.
So maybe restrict Cruise? Or allow expansion only for companies that show excellency? In my opinion that would be a shame to prevent good implementations from being used because of the existence of bad implementations from competitors.
I reaaaaaaally don't trust GM's autonomous literally anywhere seeing the Cruise debacle. But hey, they're the American carmaker, so they got a free pass from the government to run wreckfully.
In this article, sure. However, Waymo is certainly not without incident in SF, especially recently (article below is from 1/24/23)...
>A Waymo autonomous vehicle was apparently stopped in the middle of a key San Francisco intersection, bringing traffic to a halt during morning rush hour.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/waymo-rush-hour-traff...
Doing drive testing of self-driving cars on public roads is always a risk, but lots of other entities cause road issues.