164
The weaponization of Waymo (www.bloodinthemachine.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] -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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent