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The weaponization of Waymo (www.bloodinthemachine.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 39 points 1 year ago (20 children)

A human driver would have the common sense not to drive into a war zone. A robotic money vacuum, not so much.

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  • [–] 82 points 1 year ago* (18 children)

    I get your point, but calling it a war zone is exactly what right wing media wants everyone to hear. It's a protest, we've had one every single weekend since 1/20, in nearly every state, and nobody needed to call the NG.

    Let it not go unsaid: fuck waymo, I'm happy to see those death traps burn.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Death traps? Can you elaborate?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YwN5hU5PYWs Sure, this wasn't that dangerous, but knowing that you gotta call Customer Service to get the car to stop in case of emergency is pretty bad design, safety wise.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    knowing that you gotta call Customer Service to get the car to stop in case of emergency is pretty bad design, safety wise.

    You don't. He didn't want to push the button, himself, because he expected customer service to do something different. But there's a button on the screen right in front of him, as well as in his app, that will make the car immediately pull over and unlock the doors. You can hear the rep trying to direct him to push the button, and he refuses because he wants to be stubborn for his video.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    good to know there's a button in the car. For some reason I thought there only was one in the app which, would it have been the case, is fine if you called the car, but if you're a guest passenger or just in an emergency and can't use the phone, then you'd be screwed.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Doesn't sound too death trappy. Driverless vehicles hold the potential to save many thousands of lives. We should demand the best in the process of transition, and there's no reason to be corporate schills, but fear mongering this technology only slows progress.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I agree that it would be safer eventually, but also, testing in vitae might not be the good way to do it. Sure, testing in prod is fast, but there is a reason we don't do it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A driverless car without an emergency stop button IS a death trap. Arguing that this is not so is just really dumb, sorry. All big machinery have emergency stops for a reason, and the laws for those reasons usually are written in blood.

    A driverless car without an emergency stop is a disaster in the making

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Have you been in one of these vehicles? There is an emergency stop. It's just not a brake. Are you assuming that people can better predict when it's safe to stop emergently? I've never seen data that shows that. If you are in a panic situation the emergency stop pulls over and stops as soon as it can do so safely. You can't break a bus or a train or a taxi. As a passenger you can request any of those to stop when safe to do so. Cars are death traps. People are dying in cars all the time. Driverless vehicles are a safer option and saying otherwise is either ignorance or pushing a luddite agenda.

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