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Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this shields the company from liability. Instead it provides some ammunition to use in the event of a lawsuit. Things are very different between employees and the general public. I imagine a jury would find that a lady-busting security robot is negligent by default. Whereas, a fork lift driver would be assumed to be doing his job and that situational negligence would need to be proven.

Note that my company does a lot of mandatory training before you are allowed to enter the manufacturing areas. Forklift safety is only a part of it (though a large part as everything else is common sense says you wouldn't do this while forklifts don't follow common sense rules) I agree if this is a public place a jury would and should find the robots at fault. (unless the robots are running some sort of arrest her ro…

Obligatory forklift training video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTV2HdLnN7I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%9...

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are "security robots" for the uninitiated?

These boys https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40642968 The ennui of their life clearly leads to their prematurely choosing one answer to Camus’s great question.

Hilarious as that final image is, nearly 200kg of hardware able to drive itself about and randomly fall down stairs is incredibly dangerous.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#323

A couple of years ago, I was attacked by a Kiwi bot near a UC campus. This is my story. The bot and I were moving towards each other on a sidewalk, and when I came close it stopped, as they do when sensing an object in front of them. But there was an awkward moment as I tried to go around it and it repeatedly jerked forward an inch as its motor kicked on and off. Maybe I was walking around the very edge of its radius…

Obligatory link to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Even if the Laws were real (they're not) they won't work if all you have to do is add some adversarial interference to some neural thing to make the robot think that the human is not a human, or, even better, another robot that will harm a human. Then it's a moral imperative under 3LoR to destroy that "robot".

This trick also works on humans: you can often circumvent their "protect humans" programming by simply messing with their classification system to label a human as "terrorist", "infidel", or even "unemployed".

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#324
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. There's absolutely no comparison between the dangers of scooters and cars. Every person who decides to use a scooter instead of driving or taking a taxi is having a huge positive effect on safety.

Counterpoint: These scooters go 20 MPH and there's no oversight on where or how they are used. I walk around a 'pedestrian only' lake every day, and these scooters come about literally 2 inches from me going 20 mph every 2-3 minutes. Usually they are driven by (likely drunk) teenagers. My daily walk is incredibly more dangerous and stressful due to these scooters existing.

Maybe it depends on the cities but where I live, these scooters are limited to about 12.5 mph (20 km/h), and are supposed to share the space with bikes on the bike lanes and road, not on the sidewalk. So while they are indeed parked on the sidewalk everywhere, I do not see them as dangerous at all.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#325
post #242

We were walking past one of these robots whose wheel got stuck halfway off the curb, so it was completely stuck. My friend helped it back up, and it had a prerecorded voice say “thank you for helping me!” It was unexpected and delightful to be thanked by a robot, we make sure to help any we see that are in distress, even though we know they’re owned by a private company with profits in mind.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy talked about this...

> THE WISE OLD BIRD: Listen. Our world suffered two blights. One was the blight of the robots.

> ARTHUR DENT: Tried to take over, did they?

> THE WISE OLD BIRD: Oh no, no, no my dear fellow. Much worse than that. They told us they liked us.

I tweeted about a similar situation a while back: https://twitter.com/riskable/status/1477405779699564546

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are scooters more dangerous than cars? No. But you've internalized the 1.4 million yearly global deaths from car crashes as "normal".

You don't know me. Me saying scooters are dangerous does not, in any way shape or form, imply that I think cars are safe. They are death machines that I would also very much like to see gone.

OK, I was a bit presumptuous. Replace "you" with "the public at large".

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#327
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. There's absolutely no comparison between the dangers of scooters and cars. Every person who decides to use a scooter instead of driving or taking a taxi is having a huge positive effect on safety.

Counterpoint: These scooters go 20 MPH and there's no oversight on where or how they are used. I walk around a 'pedestrian only' lake every day, and these scooters come about literally 2 inches from me going 20 mph every 2-3 minutes. Usually they are driven by (likely drunk) teenagers. My daily walk is incredibly more dangerous and stressful due to these scooters existing.

That's a pretty different situation than what people who walk around cities for transportation deal with. I have no objections to banning scooters, bikes, etc from recreational pedestrian areas.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#328
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? There are numerous clips where Telsas in "full self driving" mode pull the equivalent maneuver of a teenager going "OH SHIT I WANT TO GO THERE" and veering very violently. The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

Expense was part of the equation initially, however, through economies of scale, we eventually would have been able to reach a feasible price point. Cost has nothing to do with why Tesla is pursuing an optical-only system. To get rid of the dependency on the radar sensor for autopilot, we generated over 10 billion labels across two and a half million clips. To do this we had to scale our offline neural networks and o…

Those are very large numbers for something that doesn’t work very well.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#329
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is there's no designated place to park them. You can't put them on the property line next to the sidewalk. Many sidewalks don't have a "planter" or other non-walking area. Sidewalks weren't designed for this. I think we should ban sidewalk scooter parking. The public right of way is not a parking lot for private companies. As an aside: many (most?) people who need sidewalks choose to use the road instead be…

> The thing is there's no designated place to park them. We have designated parking spots for rideshare scooters in London.

Yes, we have this in my city too, and it works really well - I’d say 98% of scooters get parked in these places. The council leans on the hire company to incentivise good parking - seems like a solved problem.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#330
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want one of those pneumatic tubes that banks have installed that runs from the local Chipotle to my house ... I'd even pay for it. I think even random citizens would be happy to adjust to it.

Stanford has a pneumatic tube system for lab samples and it's several miles long and you can tour it! https://sm.stanford.edu/archive/stanmed/2010summer/article4.... I would abuse the FUCK out of a burrito delivery pneumatic tube system to my house and would become orca fat.

There was a good "how its made" out there that showed a company that sells them for hospitals and etc.

It was cool to see how the various intersections and etc worked.

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