Atleast with the running over pedestrian scenario, I would think the passengers have a manual way to interrupt program logic/stop.

Also, you'd best believe truck decapitations happened a lot without self driving, enough to mandate that trailers have those guardrails below their unloading doors.

I wonder if they have a scoop to load the body into the trunk

Yeah, if you can send them after specific targets I'd call that a premium feature.

Someone offers you a button. If you push it, you get a driverless taxi ride for $20 but there's a small chance that a random person in your city dies. Do you push the button?

mainstream "journalism" is about rage baiting engagement. Anytime an article has an inflammatory title about what someone says 95% of the time they are being misquoted. In these hundreds of comments I've only seen your comment mentioning that. No one questions anything anymore, if its about something they don't like then it must be true. Even though the futurism article directly links the article its talking about and the full quote/context of what the ceo was saying. I'm not a fan of waymo (and certainly not google's evil ways) but facts seem to be a distant ancient theory these days. Pitchforks first then think later.

idk if the author chose that title maybe its futurism itself but a more accurate description would have been something like "our cars are safe but we are also prepared/preparing for when something bad happens". That doesn't get clicks tho.

If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn’t a horrifying dystopian world we’re potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.

You need to prove this number. Looking at the behavior of current driverless cars, the software is still shit, and nothing has reached Level 5 Autonomous Driving. There are too many edge cases, and conflicting behavior points. Navigating a world of humans driving in different ways with complex urban and rural streets is a very very messy affair.

Hell, nobody in the space can even answer this simple question correctly: If the speed limit is 55 MPH on the highway, and everybody is going 65 MPH, and we know that the delta of speed is what kills people in highway car accidents, what speed does the driverless car use?

(Hint: the correct answer is not 55.)

If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it.

The "if" in this sentence is a load bearing word.

With today's crew running the policy, I don't think anyone will prevent corporations from unleashing completely unsafe robotic taxis on the public that'll perform well worse than regular ones. I really wish people would stop making this argument to the corporation's benefit until we have some data backing it up.

I get that there's a theoretical possibility that still imperfect robotic taxis could outperform humans, but that's just theoretical.

With the way corporate accountability is handled (i.e., corporations aren't held accountable) nowadays, I just don't see robotic taxis as much more than an accountability sink and at this point I'd prefer taking regular taxis because at least there is someone to fucking hold accountable when things go wrong.

yeah… very much public health attitude

Watch “Upload” on prime. Literally about this.

Except there's a difference between a machine killing somebody because it was programmed to and a person killing somebody on accident. One of those things has people making decisions who are not going to be held responsible.

The other problem is it creates openings for malicious actors: if your government (or even Saudi Arabia, or Israel) for instance wanted to kill a political dissident they could add a self erasing line of code to a car to run over a specific person.

This is why self driving laws need to be explicit about how they're approaching this otherwise you're inviting in a lot of suspicious behavior by amoral companies. There needs to be safeguards on how and who has access to self driving code.

I would say that source code for any self driving or autonomous machine in a public street should be held by insurance companies or a third party who performs regular validation checks on vehicle codes (which could be read and validated at charging stations or gas stations) and it should only be edited by publicly licensed software engineers whose licenses can be revoked for bad behavior.

Anything less is inviting a series of predictable public safety fiascos.

We can always make it not so voluntary.

There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.

The difference is accountability. If a human kills another human because of a car accident, they are liable, even criminally liable, given the right circumstances. If a driverless car kills another human because of a car accident, you're presented with a lose-lose scenario, depending on the legal implementation:

1. If the car manufacturer says that somebody must be behind the wheel, even though the car is doing all of the driving, the person is suddenly liable for the accident. They are expected to just sit there and watch for a potential accident, but the behavior of what an AI model will do is undefined. Is the model going to stop in front of that passenger as expected? How long do they wait to see before they take back control? It's not like cruise control, a feature that only controls part of the car, where they know exactly how it behaves and when to take back control. It's the equivalent of asking a person to watch a panel with a single red light for an hour, and push a button as fast as possible when it blinks for a half-second.

2. If the model is truly driverless (like these taxis), then NOBODY is liable for the accident. The company behind it might get sued, or might end up in a class-action lawsuit, but there is no criminal liability, and none of these lawsuits will result in enough financial impact to facilitate change. The companies have no incentive to fix their software, and will continue to parrot this shitty line about how it's somehow better than humans at driving, despite these easily hackable scenarios and zero accountability.

Humans have an incentive to not kill people, since nobody wants to have that on their conscience, and nobody wants to go to prison over it.

Corporations don't. In fact, they have an incentive to kill people over profits, if the choice presents itself!

Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals.

I think that's overstating it a bit, of course many care, and we have people who are responsible for setting safety standards.
Just because accidents are unavoidable doesn't mean we aren't trying to minimize them and avoid fatalities.

Mandatory safety belts is an example of this. But other than that there are actual scientific studies into road safety, and even city wide implementations of such studies. At least in Europe there is, but I'm guessing USA has it too.

Just because traffic accidents happen, and we obviously need "traffic" to be able to move around, doesn't mean nobody cares.

As an anecdotal example, here (Denmark) the speed limit was increased from 110 to 130 on our equivalent to Autobahn, which may seem like accepting more accidents for convenience or efficiency. But in reality it was to divert more traffic to the safer "Autobahn" to actually reduce the number of accidents on smaller roads.

Traffic safety is as much about psychology as it is about making safer systems.

PPS:
Regarding the animals we have just had warnings about deer, and some places have small tunnels made for frogs.
And there are warning signs where deer tend to cross in almost any country that has them.

More so when you take her actual statement in context: that they're actually reducing deaths by being safer. The comments on lemmy are turning out to be just as biased and ungrounded in reality as they were on Reddit.

Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.

And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.

Self driving cars will have far less accidents and deaths than human driven cars. But the idea of being killed by human error is acceptable to us but the idea of a machine fucking up and killing us is terrifying, even if it means one self driving accident will create algorithms to avoid that same incident on all cars. Whereas human error can happen over and over in the same situation

Remember gross negligence counts as human sacrifice!

"Knew or should have known"

Slight misunderstanding here. Every country has a whole bunch of "that guy" who likes to do stupid shit to the detriment of society. Sometimes it's the poor and uneducated, sometimes it's the ultra wealthy unburdened by their sociopathy. It varies.

Most first world countries set up safety nets, assistance, pro-people laws; you know, a society that understands the why and how of the situation these people find themselves in so that society can be there to cushion the impact on everyone, improving society as a whole.

Not with us U.S.ians. We give those people three wheelers, moonshine, YouTube accounts, and private jets in the hopes that their insufferable behavior sorts itself out against the immutable laws of nature and thermodynamics. There's a ton of land over here, so we have the luxury of letting these kinds of things play out. Mostly [ see EPA and Superfund Sites to learn more! ]

Which is more than we can say for the US head of the department of defense

How can you be sure there wasn't already a cover up?

Bets on that a car attempted to drive thru a chained-off or roped-off parking lot. Car vs steel cable? Someone or something went airborne.

Very true. I wonder about accountability though.

I think the reaction here means that the CEO is wrong. People care more about revenge and punishment than about harm reduction. They prefer more deaths on the road as long as it's humans doing the killing, because we can put them in jail.

Look up how many automobile fatalities there are per thousand miles driven, and how many waymo has power thousand miles driven

developing the fast rail system, at least in california, it was blocked by musk and the gop(elaine chao in trumps 1st term, mitch mcconells wife). cali never tried again.

Maybe that someone is a CEO?

I'd take it even farther - abolish the corporate veil. Hold the investors accountable for the things they pay their fall guy to do. They're basically hiring hit men.

If they can't afford the liability insurance, then they're planning on pushing that cost onto the public and their company should not exist.

I'm ready to go Gollum mode on a billionaire tbfh

Oh bud, are you new here? Welcome. This particular corner bar of the Internet that you’ve stumbled into doesn’t take kindly to technology that severs the person from the job.