Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don’t need to be perfect, just better than humans?
@JackbyDev@programming.dev @return2ozma@lemmy.world well that’s still Waymo’s argument I think. Elon is a bit different in many ways…
There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.
The only response was, “company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix.”
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
But if a corporation does it it is, “Oops, we will do better next time.”
Utterly insane.
No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.
They wrote the legislation that allowed themselves to operate self driving vehicles. Every one of these vehicles is a symbol of the oligarchy at work.
It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.
This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.
And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.
It isn’t a unique Texas Law. It’s law everywhere in the US and Canada.
“mostly all in North America, require all surrounding vehicles to stop when a school bus is stopped with its red lights flashing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws
“And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.”
Only if you are from a different country.
Which is beside the point that if anyone else drove through 20 bus stops, they couldn’t use the excuse, “I’m from another country so I don’t know your laws.” to get out of jail.
That it’s a software fix is also beside the point. “Oh I drove illegally 20 times. I know better and won’t do it again.”
One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to… taxis? Would not that be much more sane?
Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.
Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?
If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.
I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.
Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn’t distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I’m not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during “boring times”?
Sorry, I’m just rambling here …
perhaps the governance of the united states was never really meant to be effective, but good enough for now, before they could usher in the new era, of His dominion upon earth. hyper-techno-christian-fascism is gonna taste so good in the chips aisle
I don’t think the blank cheque handed to these emergent technologies is a function of the times in which they emerged. Rather it’s the fact that technology advances much faster than the wheels of government turn; it’s nearly inevitable that new technologies will be largely unregulated until government can catch up.
Yet $TSLA stock just keeps going up. Remember when news like this would actually mean something in the stock market? America’s economy is like 🤏 this close to collapse because everything is fake and nothing matters.
I will never take any auto autonomous Tesla. Waymo maybe, but always a taxi or Uber and better yet a bus or train.
I can’t remember how many safety features Tesla has foregone in the name of profit, but my perception of them is that they’re death machines for both riders and pedestrians. No thank you
Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.
They still drive better than Elon who is in a k hole right now 👍
Feeling a bit smug since I was early adopter of calling “self-driving” cars a grift. Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?
My campus has a self driving mini bus service though there’s a real driver in the driver’s seat jic.
So was it worth it, if you still have to employ a mini-bus driver…?
No idea, when I attended, I walked to school after riding the train.
Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.
We shouldn’t be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
But I guess that’s not profitable so I guess we’ll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.
I mean the US is heavily car centric. Self driving cars are an attempt to adapt to what the reality of the world currently is.
We should absolutely be doing things to make cars less of a requirement by improving public transit and creating more livable spaces that don’t require cars, that can even be the primary goal, but it won’t eliminate cars completely, and if it does it will take A LOT longer than self driving cars.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Quick edit: Also the cars Musk is developing are not even close to what we need. He’s being deliberately obtuse and creating more problems than he’s solving.
Self driving cars are a great idea, but they aren’t a fix everything solution, they just one part of an overall solution.
Why are they a great idea? What are they making better? How is it worth the real and opportunity costs?
They’re safer than human drivers. Tesla cars absolutely are not. But Waymo cars? They do seem to be.
It’s still early. We still need more data. They should be closely watched. But self driving cars do appear to be safer. That’s why they are a great idea. They are making driving and roads better.
I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).
To be fair I don’t have 100% confidence that self driving is safer than human driving. I just believe that based on the current data, it seems to be. If new data comes out tomorrow, then I’ll look at and evaluate that data.
I also don’t believe that investment is a zero sum game. We should absolutely be investing in both. Both are valuable. You don’t have to only invest in one.
While I’d absolutely love better and more public transit, it just doesn’t make sense in a lot of areas that are too spread out or don’t have enough people per square mile.
We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don’t need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.
when someone figures out how to make the better options more profitable than the bad options we’ll finally see progress.
until then we’re fucked
It’s a shame someone named Arthur Pigou never figured out a solution over a century ago.
that’s nifty. now we have to figure out how to get our legislature to pass said proposed solution, which is the actual hard part.
