While this is tragic, undeniably so, it’s worth knowing that a head on collision in Malibu two days ago killed a 50 year old man when a 20 year old crossed over the double yellow line. It was obvious seeing the car that the young person was racing and driving dangerously. It barely made the news. I only know it happened because I drove past the wreck.
Tragic about the cat - and Waymo must improve - but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.
No, We should be fighting tooth and nail against these companies. They're not here to save us from ourselves. They're using public streets to Alpha (beta if you want to be generous) test autonomous lethal weapons, and then profit off of it when it works.
I can't find anything saying waymo has a thermal camera. They aren't expensive- certainly not compared to the LIDAR- and provide extremely discriminated input on "am I about to kill something?" They're not perfect as foul weather and fog are likely to blind thermal- but they shouldn't be driving in suboptimal conditions until they have a track record of safety in optimal ones.
What criteria would you consider sufficient for deployment on public streets? My experience is that people opposed to AV technology usually aren't familiar with the level of validation that's been done and tend to have expectations that are either impossible or are already met.
Waymo has experimented with thermal imaging in the past. I've never seen experiments indicating it's a particularly valuable modality for AVs, and high resolution thermal cameras exceed the price of decent LIDAR these days. You can easily spend $10k+ on a FLIR sensor with a pixel count higher than 4 digits.
Waymo was started partly to save lives by Sebastian Thrun who lost a friend to a car accident when he was 18. They have about 1/3 the accident rate of human drivers. Calling this stuff evil is kind of sad.
In some countries, drivers are expected to prove their ability to operate heavy machinery safely, held that promise, and governments prioritize zero deaths in their spending and policy making.
In the U.S., billions of dollars that could be spent on proven ways of solving the problem are instead spend on speculative robotic car development.
Robotic cars are not the only solution. They may eventually be as effective as proven solutions that are offensive to U.S. car supremacists, but as of today, robotic cars have proven only to be better than untrained, inattentive U.S. drivers and the life-threatening domestic policies that enable them. Robotic cars aren’t trying to solve the problem; they’re trying to capture spending on the problem. If transportation policy magically changed overnight to force immediate, funded implementation of proven safety processes from other countries, the excuses given for Waymo and others to beta-test their “these fatalities are a necessary accident in service of zero deaths” robotic vehicles would no longer hold water.
Autonomous vehicles don't impede transit advocacy, and they genuinely can be massive accessibility improvements to disabled and disadvantaged populations. Unless you have a magic wand to make those changes, it seems like AVs are an improvement over the current situation?
Transit changes are not required to implement the safety changes made by other countries. The cause and effect is reversed here: safety changes make transit more appealing because safety changes tend to decrease peak vehicle capacity, but transit does not make safety more appealing to untrained and overconfident (or willfully unsafe) drivers. You can’t just focus on transit while ignoring drivers and expect people to stop dying.
I remember during the first days of Covid lockdown how 99% of the cars on the busy hill outside my apartment were replaced by transit, with a commute distance of zero miles. The people who liked to do downhill racing on that hill during the day sped up from their usual brake-screech limits of 40mph to as high as 70mph, in a 35mph residential with an unsignaled busy crosswalk. And they continued doing this until the end of the lockdown when other cars got in their way again. Transit might reduce total car volume but it would increase the mean kill rate per roadway vehicle without safety culture and spending shifts.
Regardless, people who are on transit or in autonomous vehicles are people who won't be increasing roadway risk. AVs can adopt new driving rules without the typical years of political struggle over license points. AVs also have capabilities for better traffic shaping in cities. Responding to SF's market street closure was very easy with AVs. It was the uber drivers and tourists who struggled.
Meanwhile, she persisted, we could have zero deaths tomorrow if it was important to our culture. As we each recognized, the culture clearly isn’t changing anytime soon — but that lack of cultural concern invalidates “reduces deaths” as a relevant marketing claim for robotic cars. Why is it the preferred talking point for advocates when it’s demonstrably irrelevant?
If we lowered the speed limit to 20 miles per hour country wide we would be a lot closer to zero deaths. But at what cost?
We live in an imperfect world of trade offs, not perfect solutions. Even requiring people to wear seatbelts has a cost
I genuinely don't understand what policy changes you think would lead to zero deaths tomorrow. We'd still have deaths even if no one left their driveway without a valid CDL and a resolve to never exceed 10km/h.
Yeah, I get that; and! some of it is particularly nonintuitive outcomes from human psych/soci that look ghastly through a rational behavior lens. There’s a lot of reading that one can do on the subject if independently curious.
So tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
> tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
Easy, most people fit that description actually. And that's fortunate because otherwise the world would collapse pretty quickly from lack of midwifes and gynecologists.
In fact, the neoliberal cult that neglects the human nature and pretends everything is shaped by monetary incentives is slowly destroying our societies…
Everyone need to pay their bills but that's a completely different thing from being “profit seeking”.
I'm pretty positive that very few of the women you know do prostitute themselves for a living despite it being the most profitable activity imaginable. Turns out most women aren't profit-seeking after all.
Reporting. I try to solve problems just to get them solved. I don't seek to enrich myself. By the way, living in your world of profit-seeking-at-all-costs maximalism is the cruelest fate imaginable, but assholes normalizing maximized greed are a dime a dozen, ruining things for everyone else.
Tragic about the cat - and Waymo must improve - but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.