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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 t

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.

standardUser 3y ago
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.
- more_corn 3y ago
  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. There are safety incidents they’re unacceptable.
  - ameister14 3y ago
    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?
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      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!
      - skeaker 3y ago
        This is not an argument (your situation is non-existent and fallacious) so you've more or less lost this debate here, but I'll give that it was funny.
      - greiskul 3y ago
        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.
        3y ago
- notakio 3y ago
  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.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    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.
    - notakio 3y ago
      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.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >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.
  - hadlock 3y ago
    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.
    - BeefWellington 3y ago
      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. [1]: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/11/22276851/california-self-driving-autonomous-cars-miles-waymo-cruise-2020 https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/11/22276851/california-self-...
      - 3y ago
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  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.
  - szundi 3y ago
    Then no one is going to implement it probably. Or is it just jail time when dead are more than with humans?
  - tlb 3y ago
    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? Or a table of | relative death rate | accountability | would cover the widest range of future scenarios.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      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.
  - __loam 3y ago
    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.

standardUser 3y ago

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.

more_corn 3y ago
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. There are safety incidents they’re unacceptable.
- ameister14 3y ago
  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?
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    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!
    - skeaker 3y ago
      This is not an argument (your situation is non-existent and fallacious) so you've more or less lost this debate here, but I'll give that it was funny.
    - greiskul 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago
notakio 3y ago
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.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  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.
  - notakio 3y ago
    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.
Barrin92 3y ago
>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.
- hadlock 3y ago
  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.
  - BeefWellington 3y ago
    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. [1]: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/11/22276851/california-self-driving-autonomous-cars-miles-waymo-cruise-2020 https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/11/22276851/california-self-...
    - 3y ago
Eisenstein 3y ago
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.
- szundi 3y ago
  Then no one is going to implement it probably. Or is it just jail time when dead are more than with humans?
- tlb 3y ago
  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? Or a table of | relative death rate | accountability | would cover the widest range of future scenarios.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    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.
- __loam 3y ago
  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.