I'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety, traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start.
For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars. We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket
And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that should not be excused as "oh it's just learning".
Self driving car companies love to release reports comparing themselves against regular drivers when it comes to collisions and deaths, but conveniently skip over every other aspect of driving. The way things are today, if we continue to release more and more of them into San Francisco it will basically lead up to a total traffic deadlock, and yet people will still keep repeating "oh but they kill 0.1 fewer people per million miles so it's an improvement".
During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.
I've participated and watched critical mass any number of times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly.
The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act aggressively or unsafely.
Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when people react defensively.
> Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist.
They should do nothing. You cannot knock over a cyclist in a stationary car.
Swarming a car and preventing it from moving- sure, the safest thing for the car to do is stop driving, but... I don't think that's really a good defense of confrontational bikers.
Most of the incidents involving cars were instigated by the drivers of cars. I couldn't find an instance where a car wasn't trying to ride through the cyclists, or the driver hadn't picked a fight verbally.
Can you highlight an incident where cyclists antagonized an otherwise passive observer in a car?
> a mother from Redwood City, California, traveling with her two young daughters in the vehicle, tried to drive through the mass of riders. A witness claimed to have observed the driver strike a cyclist and flee before cyclists chased and surrounded her vehicle.[68][69] The driver denied striking a cyclist
Like I said: the incidents are largely instigated by drivers. It is unclear if she hit someone, but it IS clear that she drove into a mass of cyclists. Again, don’t drive your vehicle into an anti vehicle protest, or any protest for that matter. It sounds like if she had just done nothing, nothing would have happened. I’m not saying the cyclists are in the right. I am saying that if you drive a multi ton vehicle into a mass of cyclists protesting the dominance of multi ton vehicles it is an actual and perceived threat to their safety. Even if the driver doesn’t think it is. You shouldn’t be surprised when people respond.
"It's a peaceful protest as long as you don't engage with it". This is you. What actual reason is there for society to find this kind of attitude acceptable or compelling?
Not sure what you expect here. If you become violent in response to provocation, you are still a peaceful protester (within some limit of violence, which surrounding a car so it can't move certainly fits with).
A non-peaceful protest is one where protesters actively attack people and property that are not engaging with them in any conceivable way.
If protestors organized in front of a police station to protest police violence and then attacked a police officer who tried to make her way through the crowd to the office, would you still be defending the protestors?
It’s not an excuse to just be in the way and then attack people who try to get through.
If they in any way used disproportionate force? Yes.
This is what needs to be understood: a car moving through a group of cyclists can easily cause death or injury, and regularly does. The cyclists aren’t going after people who disagree with them. They are going after people who willfully try to use a multi ton vehicle against the human body to get their way.
The two critical mass's I participated in blocking traffic was limited to everyone passing through an intersection and then continuing on. Annoying for drivers no doubt but never as egregious as locking someone in specifically for an extended amount of time.
The riders tend to move pretty quickly so it was at most a few minutes and never swarming vehicles to a standstill.
I kinda think a vehicle being surrounded by people on bicycles is a much different situation than someone putting a traffic cone on the hood.
I think you're actually disproving your own point: a human driver would immediately know what to do if someone put a cone on their hood. But both a human driver and AV would have a similarly difficult time when faced with a bunch of cyclists surrounding them.
Uhhh... if you're surrounding by multiple layers of cyclists and try to drive your way out hitting a few cyclists, the cyclists are going to swarm your car and kill you.
To be fair, I think this only happened a few times and it was caused by a small number of bad players, while the majority of Critical Mass participants were ethically (if somewhat inconveniently) demonstrating their collective power.
What happens when you cross an autonomous car and stand-your-ground gun laws? Through in some citizens united where a corporation is a person, and you might have cars that fight back...
The future must be interesting, I feel bad we only get to see the 20's, like whoever lived in the 20's in the last century and died before the 70's saw nothing!
> And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path
Are you considering someone putting a traffic cone on a vehicle a day-to-day situation?
What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhere close to being intelligent enough to handle city driving, and won't be for a very long time.
They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation?
Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.
> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm
That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!
A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.
I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt?
Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at scale, AV should be able to handle them not just as well as humans do but much better.
If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!
Putting cone on self driving car is vandalism and should be punished accordingly. Self driving companies have footage of people doing it. Is SFPD looking for these people? Self driving companies shouldn't need to be able to deal with criminals trying to actively disable it. These cars weren't designed to drive in a warzone. Most businesses are not able to operate when criminals try to actively interfere with its operations. Some basic level of law and order is required for modern society to exist.
Vandalism in California requires "maliciously damaging, destroying or defacing someone else's property". A cone on a hood does none of those things.
It might be some other crime, but we can't slap people with charges that won't stick in a court of law.
The counterpoint to the argument is that you shouldn't be deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no ability to handle common issues and expecting it to be a problem for the SFPD/CHP.
It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic? What's actually the right thing to do, both as a person and as an AV?
More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles, intentionally to confuse or disrupt the driver? Or should they be punished?
> It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away.
Hah, good call. I'm thinking that if I was at a traffic light or stop sign, and it wasn't a major road with other lanes of cars and lots of traffic whizzing by, I'd hop out, move the cone, and go about my day. If I didn't feel safe, I'd accelerate slowly enough so as not to shake off the cone, and move to the side of the road and deal with it there.
> More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles
No, it absolutely shouldn't. In the case at hand, what if one of these AVs with a cone on it ended up blocking traffic and delaying an ambulance or fire truck, causing someone to die? I get that this is a protest movement, but I wouldn't want that on my conscience. And people protest in all kinds of ways that aren't legal (often called "civil disobedience"). People who do that should expect to suffer consequences, and accept that outcome as a part of the protest.
It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the city.
I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's windshield or slashing their tires is a crime.
It looks like neither Waymo or Cruise has driven enough miles (>70M miles driven per fatality) to really expect to see a fatality if the SDCs are roughly the same as an average driver?
If you start putting cones on the hoods of human driven taxis at red lights, that will also cause traffic diversions. The tendency of humans to pester the driverless taxis more than the drivered ones doesn’t seem like any metric related to the technology’s performance. Someone putting a traffic cone on the hood of your car is more than a typical deviation from the happy path.
As to your personal anecdote, all I can say is it’s different from my own experience driving in SF or riding in my partner’s car. We see plenty of driverless vehicles, and generally they’re behaving smarter than the average SF Saturday morning driver, not worse. I don’t live in a cruise-populated neighborhood so I’m sure your experience may vary elsewhere.
On that note, my neighborhood doesn’t have much transit at all. It’s a 30m walk to a grocery store or 25 to the 3rd st muni. We only get limited bus service. So I would be very happy to see additional transit options in SF.
I wouldn't call it daily from my observations, but it's common enough in the Mission that it's not a surprise (I'm probably within a mile of the garages that Cruise and Waymo use).
Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it was an attempt to rob me or steal my car.
Having things like that categorized differently makes sense because it’s caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid people.
Man, and further up this post there was someone talking about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously surrounded their car.
Try to remain calm. You’re generally not allowed to just _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or rob you, even though they are ‘being dicks’. That’s not how crime is dealt with in a stable society. It’s not a ‘new reality’.
I really hope we’re not devolving into a place where more people think this way…
How far gone are you to think that kidnapping and robbery aren't violent acts that justify violent responses? If you try to detain me illegally (also known as false imprisonment) you're just asking for a face full of lead. But 'Murder' is unlawful killing. This would be self-defense.
Right, but the law doesn't allow you (in California, at least) to assume that someone (for example) putting a cone on your car is also intending to rob or kidnap or kill you.
And even then, you are not legally allowed to use deadly force to protect your belongings; you can only do so if your life is in danger.
Certainly some places have "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" laws that give you more latitude to use self-defense as legal justification, but even in places like that, it's not absolute.
The acts I listed [edit: or the one in the grandparent post - it’s literally talking about putting a cone on a car…] don’t necessarily involve violence.
Even if they do, self-defense has to be proportional. Laws obviously differ in different places, but, generally, yes, you can defend yourself. You generally can’t kill someone unless you yourself are under a plausible threat of death though.
Thanks for that link. Points 8, 9 and 10 seem so appropriate.
I often feel that we’re similarly in danger of forgetting the adage that “it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent.”
I’m not sure we really are ‘that far gone’ though. I’m hopeful that people just always feel like this a little, to greater and lesser extents. Both the world and America have been through darker periods in the past.
Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more people think doing things like this is ok. The solution isn’t to run them over - your advice to remain calm is good.
But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.
You want life-altering fines and prison for inconveniencing cars? Do you think the US judicial system is at all capable of applying this fairly? That law would exist for a day before someone deemed "undesirable" is arrested for not getting across the street faster than the crosswalk signal.
Mental breakdown in the street? Jail
Cyclist riding in a way the cops don't like? Jail
Grandma can't get her wheelchair up the curb ramp? Jail
I’m saying organized, pre-meditated action designed to disrupt traffic. Laying in the street to protest, for example. Someone could be blocked while driving to a hospital etc.
People should have the courage of their convictions. This allows that.
Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant. If the fire truck can't get to the fire because the car blocks the road, it can't get to the fire.
Responsibility stops with the CEO, so we need to hold them accountable. The alternative is to say that driverless can do any and all harm and nobody can be ever held reponsible simply because there is no driver.
> we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic
They were talking about people intentionally messing with SDVs and causing incidents
You tried to turn it on them by saying
> So for instance, the CEO of the self-driving car company should go to jail whenever one of their cars blocks a fire truck. Right?
Presumably equating a SDV having an issue with people intentionally blocking traffic.
I commented on that with a tongue-in-cheek statement about the CEO intentionally blocking firetrucks as a protest.
You replied with
> Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant.
The other commenter said
> Intent matters.
You profess confusion about how their comment follows the thread, but that's the whole point. You said CEOs should be responsible for their vehicles blocking traffic in response to a message about people intentionally blocking traffic. That gives the appearance that you think a fault in a SDV is equivalent to intentionally blocking traffic. A SDV having a fault is like your car breaking down. Are you personally liable if your broken vehicle blocks a fire truck? You may be subject to the ire of the FD and they may destroy your vehicle in the execution of their duty, but you aren't treated like you intended to block traffic. You just happened to have a vehicle that decided to stop working.
If that's the penalty for delaying traffic, a DUI or texting while driving should be life in prison. Delaying traffic is much less likely to get someone killed.
Prison and life altering fines are already in place for those. If you kill a person while DD you will be charged for that and face years/decades in prison.
The GP said DUI or texting alone would have to involve life sentences, regardless if anyone was hurt or killed.
The point is that punishments that aren't in proportion to the crime don't lead to a particularly good society to live in. A society that imposes a "life altering fine" for delaying traffic is not a society I'd like to live in, and I suspect many others would agree with me.
I think if you said you’ll throw activists that intentionally block traffic in prison for 1 year you’d get 70%+ approval for the position. People are sick of the lawlessness and the excuses for it and inaction. Times up.
Putting large vision-blocking objects on people's cars while they're using it is absolutely in the class of things that will get people killed entirely gratuitously, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's right to kill the perpetrator, they certainly have no right to complain if happen not to survive the encounter.
> I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories
The premise is that these vehicles would be unilaterally "better" than human drivers and that would justify their creation and use. If that's not the case, then perhaps we need to fully reevaluate the value proposition here.
> While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
It hasn't proved to be a safety issue _yet_. We don't actually have enough data to forecast with here. I see this as a safety signal with troubling implications.
> as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving)
This is another safety signal I would be wary of... unless "hyper annoyed" is just hyperbole for it's own sake.
> We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
The problem with automation is small problems have a tendency to combine into massive emergent problems once you start scaling your fleet up.
> The problem with automation is small problems have a tendency to combine into massive emergent problems once you start scaling your fleet up.
Not in this case, no. Every driver has a small problem. Each ai driver is just another driver, replacing some driver.
Unless the ai driver problem is not small but actually quite big, I don't see how automation economics would worsen the situation. On the contrary, them all being identical and automated makes fixing the small problems much more viable.
> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket.
Google could get tough about that. If you have Google Play Services on your phone, they know who you are. "Your Google account has been terminated for violation of Google's terms of service."
I moved out of SF ~2018, and only recently revisited, and the increased frequency with which I saw robocars was immediately concerning to me, largely based on the potential for things to go wrong, and with just how frequent they were.
My second thought was, after hearing friends and family still there echo nothing for disdain for them, "how long before someone starts setting these on fire?" as some sort of nuisance campaign against the things. Turns out, 1) you don't need fire, and 2) not that long, since the cone thing started happening about a week afterwards.
I know this is a tired argument, but it's not wrong: There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people, we're just used to those horrors and reluctant to trade them for a different set of horrors, even if they are conclusively less horrible.
I lived carless in downtown SF for 10 years, usually with a walking commute, and it was not pleasant. Packed streets full of angry, stressed drivers honking and swerving and practically revving their engines as lights change so they can gun it past cyclists and pedestrians down the next narrow street. Anyone trying to replace these agro drivers with marginally-safer robots has my support.
Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as long as they are safe and someone is held accountable when they mess up.
I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or lost your data or locked you out of a service or deprecated a product because we spend no money on things that are not income generating' can not be passed on to such a system.
Suppose it's the near future and driverless cars are causing 5x fewer injuries per mile than human drivers. (5x fewer != 0, so some injuries and deaths still occur)
What accountability would you like to see in that situation?
If there is an investigation and if it is found that someone said 'don't bother with those tests just push to market' or 'let's fire the legacy system patching team because they make no money even though the cars are still driving around' and that caused directly or indirectly a car to glitch and run someone over or to get hacked and used for a crime then someone goes to prison and/or the company gets liquidated or something in between that is reasonable to ensure that it is not tempting for another company to do it again.
I am not a lawyer or a legislator and I cannot come with a regulation or law or something that would do this, but I am sure someone can.
It's a lot easier to hold a single corporation accountible than it is for the distributed responsibility of individuals. Uber killed someone and they had to leave the industry. Tesla is being actively investigated for their fly by night approach.
Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
> Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
And if it turns out they had data that showed that they knew someone was gonna get killed, but they would make more money not fixing the bug -- I would want someone to go to jail.
I have no dog in this fight. If anything, my final takeaway was that my impressions were entirely anecdotal and/or experiential, and not based on any sort of legitimate analysis with useful data. It should probably be done, but my point was more that it's only getting more complicated as people take action based on their perception, whether that perception is supported rationally or not. So now, on top of a reasonably already complex engineering problem is an additional layer to correct for: irrational human reaction.
I don't think that complicates anything from a policy perspective. If self-driving cars are good (i.e. safer than human drivers), we should be rolling them out. If a small number of people interfere with them or damage them, we should just arrest those people and prosecute them for the relevant crimes. I don't think that vandalism of self-driving cars is going to be a serious issue long term, given that anyone vandalizing them is going to be on camera, plus people will just get used to them and find other things to be mad about.
SFPD won't do anything about property crimes, to include vandalism, other than to take a preliminary report, on a schedule determined by the department (eg: you call them, they show up 8-12 hours later, uninterested in taking your report). This is because, currently, their DA's office isn't going to prosecute any property crimes.
That can all change, but speculating about the nature or timing of any changes like that is well outside my area, so I'll sit and watch from a distance.
And, again, I'm not vested in any outcome here. It'll work out however it works out, and I'm 2000+ miles away from it, so it won't have much effect on my life.
>There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people
No there isn't. Driverless cars drive under a fraction of the conditions and in self selected locations precisely because the tech is still shoddy. Not to mention they only function at all because they're vastly outnumbered by humans who know how to respond to them.
Let's do an actual experiment to compare. 100% driverless cars with current tech, from different companies on all road conditions that humans drive on during busy hours in a city and see how that goes. To even attempt to compare driverless cars to human drivers without seeing the dynamics of a non-trivial amount of them interacting, which humans need to do all the time, is meaningless.
Given the millions of miles driven since the start and a single pedestrian death in 2018, I would hesitate to call the tech shoddy. SF alone has 20-30 pedestrian deaths per year despite their well funded and almost completely ineffectual "vision zero" program. If there's been a second pedestrian fatality since I can't find it online.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, millions of miles for autonomous vehicles is a miniscule drop in the vast ocean of miles driven per year in just the US. It's essentially where you'd round the number to.
In 2020, a very down year, the Bureau of Transportation stats[1] give 1,934,743 MILLION miles driven. This Verge article[2] shows for 2020 autonomous vehicles drove 1.99 million miles in California. Let's be generous and assume across the rest of the US it's equal to double that, given Cali is the hotbed of testing at the moment. That puts us up to basically 6 million miles driven.
You're attempting to compare:
1,934,743,000,000 to
6,000,000
The data is not in yet on current generation autonomous vehicles.
Indeed you are correct: we have statistically significant samples and the autonomous vehicles are matching or exceeding fatality rates for miles driven. Meeting or exceeding human error rates would appear to support the hypothesis that it is not "shoddy".
That's not really true. They now do drive the entirety of San Francisco, 24/7, in all weather conditions. I think it's a pretty apples to apples comparison.
The one point where I agree is there aren't as many of them as there are human cars, and it's possible that in large numbers there could be some unintended consequences. Think 1000 of them getting stuck at the same location. There should be provisions limiting how fast they can scale up to make sure that doesn't happen.
Uber performed self driving car tests in downtown San Francisco for a bit. I personally saw an error where self driving cars turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.
It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was standing there and it happened again.
It was an incident.
It was a safety incident.
Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human. And there’s no comfort in the thought that it might happen less often with a robot driving.
Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism.
Your argument that not all incidents are safety incidents is misleading.
> turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.
> Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human.
This "fail to yield to pedistrians" happens way way way too much though! At least the bug in the robo-taxi could, in theory of course, eventually be fixed. The bug in the human drivers will certainly never be fixed, since this has been a frequent problem since forever and will continue to be a problem as long as human drives (or maybe the USA can just give up on right turns on red like much of the rest of the world).
> Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism.
No, it doesn't. Self-driving cars are potential substitutes for human-driven cars. If self-driving cars cause fewer injuries/accidents/etc. per mile driven, then everyone will be safer if we replace human-driven cars with them. If you object to self-driving cars being on the road even if they're safer than human-driven cars, you are implicitly saying that your preference is for more people to be injured.
You start with a common, but controversial hypothetical, that in the future self-driving cars may be safer than humans, and then conclude with that opposing self-driving cars today, which of course are not the hypothetical safer than humans car, is advocating for actual humans to be injured or killed.
No, you just didn't read what I wrote. At no point did I assert anything about the relative safety of self driving cars. I said that if you oppose self-driving cars EVEN IF they're safer...
That's called the conditional. It means that I'm not saying that thing is true; rather, it means that I am saying that if we take that thing to be true, then something follows logically.
The concept of things being conditional is pretty simple, so I guess in that sense it's undergrad level.
I remember reading somewhere that some large percentage of people can’t understand conditionals - I found it hard to believe, but I’ve been noticing it more and more.
It doesn't commit the fallacy of whataboutism - it's the same issue and a direct substitute.
Any safety incident is unacceptable is not a realistic standard, and I am not sure why a lower rate of incident is not a convincing argument for you. Yes, getting killed by a robot leaves you no less dead, but if 5 people are killed by robots where 10 people would have been killed by people, isn't that a net positive?
If 10 people were killed by people, then there could be 10 wrongful-death lawsuits and 10 car insurance claims and 10 cases of liability and 10 criminal investigations and 10 driver's licenses sanctioned, where each and every human behind the wheel must accept responsibility and assume liability for the harm caused to other human beings, and/or property.
If 5 people are killed by SDCs, then 5 executors will need to visit our website, create an account, and submit a request for reimbursement for funeral expenses. Please upload your death certificate and all itemized receipts. Our best AI will absolutely make its best efforts to find out which remote human operator caused those cars to begin driving, and then we will launch an internal investigation into whether their pay should be cut, or maybe we'll put them on paid leave instead and connect them with a grief counselor. Thank you for choosing WayMo. Scan this QR code to install our app!
You're introducing a new claim, that it will be harder for families to have justice and be compensated when a death is caused by a robotaxi rather than a human. I don't see any reason to assume this. If anything, it ought to be easier to get a rich, large, well known corporate robotaxi company to provide compensation than a random individual who might even be driving uninsured
The rich corporation is going to use their riches to exhaust your money supply on lawyers, and in the chance that you survive that test of endurance, offer a measly settlement with an NDA attached.
That's not my only claim. The additional gotcha is that the supposedly responsible human being is remote from the incident, and the regulators may find it more difficult to determine responsibility and assign liability to someone somewhere inside some very large company with a lot of network connectivity and an equal helping of plausible deniability. Compare that with a human at the wheel who hopefully carries a driver's license and proof of insurance?
Anyway, a "rich, large, well-known" company is always going to calculate the cost of a human life taken, vs. the cost of doing business, and run the margin right up to a rounding error. I don't doubt that their actuaries are just as good as GEICO's.
So you are saying that you are completely fine with 5 more people being killed, if their family gets money? I don't think thats as ethical a position as you think it is. You are putting human burocracy ahead of human lives.
It's not about "getting money". It's about recourse to the law, it's about humans who take responsibility, and it's about properly assigning liability. A single human life is precious and worth more than gold; you can't put a price on a human life. But in human burocracys, they do that. Perhaps it would be more just if the human drivers were killed in retribution? Death penalty for vehicular manslaughter? I mean, the families don't have to get money. Instead they could just receive front-row tickets in the lethal injection chamber? Is that more just, with less burocracy? We could destroy the cars that kill people, too. How's that? You could crush the car up in a compactor, then extract all the valuable minerals and other material, and award it to the families of the deceased.
Look greiskul, I don't appreciate your attempt to set up a Trolley Problem with my ridiculous and hypothetical scenario that will totally never happen in real life. My comment was intended to highlight the difference of human responsibility, assignment of liability, and recourse to legal means when someone is wronged. Just because the numbers were different in the GP, doesn't change my scenario one iota if you make it 10 and 10, or if you make it 6 minorities and 10 white male landowners, or if you make it 101 Dalmatians and a breeding pair of Tyrannosauri Rex. That wasn't the point.
greiskul, I'll thank you not to make insinuations about my ethical beliefs, especially when those insinuations serve your Trolley Problem agenda. I'm not making an ethical judgement on the state of things today here, I'm simply describing the situation as I see it. The justice system in these United States is set up a certain way, along with insurance adjusters, and the DMV/DOT, and the auto manufacturers and all the regulatory agencies that handle them. Since human dignity is inviolable, and a human life is priceless, I concur that it appears immoral for an insurance company to put a price on that human life, especially a lowball, profitable price.
They say that "money can't buy happiness" but it's a lot more comfortable to do my crying in a Mercedes than on a bicycle.
Unfortunately, SDCs are an excellent method to remove human dignity and living beings from the equation. For better or worse, the roads will be increasingly automated, and there will be fewer humans taking responsibility for their actions on the road. Corporations are people, though, so let's just give them the right to vote and be done with it?
For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars. We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.