Yes, it's pretty well understood at this point that news reports often greatly overstate the impact of an event compared to base rates. By playing to the "local neighborhood" and "cute kitty" angle while pointing at the "obvious cause" (self-driving car) that has many SF detractors, they can get a higher rate of readers, which increases their impact (and maybe ad revenue?).
At least the number of articles suggesting that trolley problems are highly relevant to self-driving car implementations have gone down.
As a Mission local, I loved routinely seeing KitKat while strolling down 16th. He was friendly and made everyone’s day a little brighter. Perhaps other SF residents on HN feel the same.
Decades ago I accidentally ran over a cat while driving fairly slow on a residential street. It dashed out between parked cars and I barely saw it at all. I'm guessing sensor-laden driverless cars are actually going to turn out to be better at avoiding those and other kinds of accidents than human drivers.
Decades ago a kitty bolted in the middle of the street.
I was less than 18, using one of those little cars that reaches at most 50 Km/h.
I slammed the break and manage to stop maybe 2 cm from the kitty, which managed to continue out of the street alive.
The scooter behind me came close to me and complained that I almost killed them by slamming the breaks.
To this day, I still don't know if that was the right call. That guy could have been a dad and I could have killed a father.
Still I couldn't think of killing a cat either.
If a vehicle can't react to the emmergency break of the vehicle ahead, it's their fault. Change the kitty for a child and the complaint of the scooter is nonsense.
I remember vividly a childhood experience when a car I was in ran over a dog -- it ran towards the side of the car and went under the rear wheels of the car. I'm not sure there's any reaction time (human or otherwise) that would have prevented that from happening.
I had a dog bolt in front of my car once on a slow residential street. He survived. It was terrifying.
Still, this cat was on a busy stretch of 16th Street for nearly a decade and was unharmed by human drivers. I think Waymo failed pretty badly here. Some of the dismissive comments I've seen on this topic seem to me like they're making excuses.
Yep, I think it’s blatantly obvious that autonomous cars of some flavor will eclipse human ability sometime this century.
The interesting point will be when insurance companies reduce your rate if your car doesn’t have a steering wheel (or, equivalently, charge a “driving manually” fee). It might be obscured if car companies take on the risk themselves, but at some point people will start to notice that driving manually costs more.
I think they're close to it now - although there isn't enough data to drive home the proof yet.
Not "better than the best", but "safer than the average driver" - and if you aren't the only one on the road, your safety is a mix of your skill and everyone else's.
Given the limited data we have so far, it's undisputable that self-driving technologies that have been deployed commercially are dramatically safer than human driving. It will take a lot more data to know exactly how true this is, but in the meantime, 120 people die per day on average in the US due to traffic accidents.
> it's undisputable that self-driving technologies that have been deployed commercially are dramatically safer than human driving
This is really only true for Waymo, who appear to be the only folks operating at scale who did the work properly. Robotaxi, Cruise and all the others are in a separate bucket and should be statistically separated.
It's also true of Apollo in China (which has about as many miles logged as Waymo), and presumably, the limited operations of Zoox. I specifically referenced commercial operations.
Undisputable? Let's see what happens with the average "accidents per km" these firms keep touting once we let a bunch of self-driving cars drive on the ring around Paris or Antwerp.
So your only dispute is that you have no dispute, only the idea that things might change in the future, and some hypothetical dispute could emerge. Got it.
Maybe some of the cost savings from autonomous vehicles should be spent on separating roads from pedestrian walkways. I can imagine a world where roads are fully-enclosed in a fence and a segment gets shut down if an animal or human somehow finds their way inside (detected via computer vision).
If we're going to fully enclose and automate them anyway, we can probably have the cars going much faster and closer together, and save energy (and make it easier and safer to keep them that close together) by having cars going the same direction attach together. And the automation would be easier if we just had like different sets of cars on fixed tracks, with splits for when people need to go different ways. And at that point why do you even own your own car, they should probably be owned and operated by the government or a large public corporation. And...
Self-driving cars are constantly subject to mini-trolley problems. By training on human data, the robots learn values that are aligned with what humans value. -- Ashok Elluswamy (VP AI/Autopilot at Tesla)
If they were using my data I'd be partly responsible, due to failing to swerve around the last few suicidal prairie dogs I rolled over. I hate when that happens but I don't attempt high speed evasions. But I would if it were something larger, human or not, out of self defense. And it's never happened but I hope I'd stomp and swerve for a toddler. I'm happy with an autopilot learning that rule set, even though I've lost too many cats under tires.
You probably get more honest answers by presenting a trolley problem and then requiring a response within a second. It's a great implicit bias probe.
Interesting, I was in a (minor) accident with a waymo and a cat in LA.
The cat survived, but waymo had no idea about the cat. It definitely could see dogs on the sidewalk fine, but cat crossing the street is just too small to notice
Readit News
Each story is probably a sad one, but hmm, an Instagram post about one of these being published on Hacker News because it involved a Waymo? Wow!
At least the number of articles suggesting that trolley problems are highly relevant to self-driving car implementations have gone down.
Dead Comment
I was less than 18, using one of those little cars that reaches at most 50 Km/h. I slammed the break and manage to stop maybe 2 cm from the kitty, which managed to continue out of the street alive.
The scooter behind me came close to me and complained that I almost killed them by slamming the breaks. To this day, I still don't know if that was the right call. That guy could have been a dad and I could have killed a father. Still I couldn't think of killing a cat either.
Still, this cat was on a busy stretch of 16th Street for nearly a decade and was unharmed by human drivers. I think Waymo failed pretty badly here. Some of the dismissive comments I've seen on this topic seem to me like they're making excuses.
The interesting point will be when insurance companies reduce your rate if your car doesn’t have a steering wheel (or, equivalently, charge a “driving manually” fee). It might be obscured if car companies take on the risk themselves, but at some point people will start to notice that driving manually costs more.
Not "better than the best", but "safer than the average driver" - and if you aren't the only one on the road, your safety is a mix of your skill and everyone else's.
This is really only true for Waymo, who appear to be the only folks operating at scale who did the work properly. Robotaxi, Cruise and all the others are in a separate bucket and should be statistically separated.
Deleted Comment
Very bleak and very tech-bro-coded, no wonder that regular people have started seeing us like pariah, we deserve it.
You probably get more honest answers by presenting a trolley problem and then requiring a response within a second. It's a great implicit bias probe.
But if this is the worst that can be said about Waymo then that gives me a lot of confidence in their general driving abilities.