Good luck making eye contact with the Waymo to gain confidence that it sees you.
Do you want them to put googley eyes on it? If you can see it, it can see you. Pretty simple. Eye contact matters for humans because they might be looking at their phones, or their McDonald's fries, or staring straight into the sun. None of these things happen with self-driving cars. It's a non-issue.
That would actually be great. Some kind of eye brow raise, a gesture, any recognition/indication that it perceives a life to preserve.
My kneejerk, not thought through notion: why not require an emergency override protocol be builtin to road using robots? No thoughts on how this would work exactly, but it would let emergency workers move robot vehicles out of the way.
How do you propose to build something like that where it’s actually limited to just emergency workers? This is like the fire keys for elevators. You can find them on eBay.
First thought would be to have the remote human over watching to engage with an emergency responder when the override is used. The remote human can then decide whether it is a real emergency or not. Either way, if any one uses an override system, a remote human should get involved. But instead, computer devs will suggest crypto/public/private keys/blahblahblah. This is one of those where the best answer will be to boot up the bio computer running the latest software
Cars block the street all the time, there is ample place to pass the waymo car on the left in the opposing lane, yet those SUV driving humans don't care to move out of the way either, and police just blocks the maneuver area too. That silver car in the front could also just pass in front and make space. Situational awareness has room to be improved for a lot of entities in this short video. Nueces Street is 3 and hal…
> there is ample place to pass This is the same excuse a Prius driver would give whilst refusing to abdicate the HOV lane for an ambulance and yes I've sadly seen this scenario play out. Multiple times, in fact. Prius driver seems oddly specific but it always is.
Eh I've seen more SUV/big car drivers act like this than small car drivers, but then I live in the UK.
A friend who lived in New York for a bit would never live there again and says driving there was an absolute nightmare; everyone's out for themselves.
And you can see it in multiple "drivers react to an ambulance in different countries videos", with America the ambulance is always blocked and going slowly. Compare to Germany where they open up the entire middle of the road by moving to either side.
Waymo's are not about to run a person or bicyclist over. Just walk in front of them and they'll stop for you to cross. You can always start livestreaming if you don't believe it, the insurance payout would be amazing . (Subject to the laws of physics, naturally.) Source: Haven't been run over yet by one, and I live in one of their current markets.
> Waymo's are not about to run a person or bicyclist over. This has only introduced more novel problems. People can completely immobilize the vehicles by standing in front of them, or placing a traffic cone. (And while this is kind of funny when done to unused vehicles to bother a multi-trillion dollar corporation. It is not funny when it's done to harass women.) This in turn spirals into a whole new set of political…
>People can completely immobilize the vehicles by standing in front of them
This is true of any vehicle lmao. Someone can stand in front of your vehicle and prevent you from proceeding and there's not a thing you can do about it.
I'd LoVE to look into it but the news website is pure cancer ads before the video, no sound clock on sound that triggers another ad to you clock back, it restart an ad and you scroll a little bit and a top ad pops up while the bottom one is still there with like 3 words of the article readable.
My kneejerk, not thought through notion: why not require an emergency override protocol be builtin to road using robots? No thoughts on how this would work exactly, but it would let emergency workers move robot vehicles out of the way.
How do you propose to build something like that where it’s actually limited to just emergency workers? This is like the fire keys for elevators. You can find them on eBay.
It doesn't sound difficult to solve. The sensors can classify firetruck, ambulance, red&blues, uniformed police, badge, siren, etc. At a certain criteria, they can unlock the driver door for normal human driving, perhaps for a very limited speed and distance. The officer can move it to the side, and if they crash it's not waymo crashing it. This override should send the an alert to the remote command center, so a human can watch the video and also decide how much further they can drive it. Since passenger safety is a concern, if there is a passenger inside who chooses to remain inside, the car should remain locked and not allow any driver in. The human can decide to follow police orders to exit the car, or remain inside, but at that point a human becomes responsible for obstructing. The whole freezing waymo trend seems driven by legal liability - not engineering. They know if they always freeze, their million miles with no accidents stats are safe.
Yes, I want to see real, serious punishment for corporate crimes, on par with the life disruption experienced by people who see a jail sentence. It's almost always brutal - major income disruption, job loss, etc. If it's a small fine, which it always seems to be for corporations, then there is no incentive for following the law. I'm also in favor of corporate death sentences for large-scale egregious violations - liq…
>By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy. Again, this is false. At the very least there's financial penalties, which the shareholders are on the hook for. Moreover the corporate malfeasance that does happen don't map nicely to human crimes. If you kill a guy, you get sent to jail for decades. But what if you're a company, that makes a machine with sloppy co…
Depending on how severe the error is, it could be professional negligence. In other professions, including engineering, this can result in a loss of the professional's license and their inability to continue to work in that field. Also, for negligent drivers, a suspension of their driving license can apply. So there is precedent for severe punishment even if nobody gets a jail sentence.
>no one can be held liable when something goes wrong. No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation. Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
I would like crimes to have consequences that actually deter the culprits from committing them. A pittance fine for a company is not what I want to see. Let's have a small percentage of net worth fine on the owners instead.
For publicly traded companies the owners/shareholders are your grandparents, teachers, all sorts of regular people. You want to take a percentage of their already small net worth?
>no one can be held liable when something goes wrong. No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation. Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
> No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation. Do they?
Are you really asking whether corporations can be sued?
> You can arrest a driver for not making space for an emergency vehicle. Who do we arrest here? That's the best part, no one! We have finally managed to invent a system that widely disperses accountability so much no one can be held liable when something goes wrong.
>no one can be held liable when something goes wrong. No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation. Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
> Do you really need someone sitting in jail to satisfy your justice boner?
Literally, and intentionally avoiding any attempt to examine the implications? No probably not.
But reasonable punishment discourages bad behavior. And software engineers have a habit of ignoring the implications of a defective design. I think apocalyptic fines applied to the companies creating the systems for automated cars would also create the correct incentives, but I find that to be less likely than imprisonment.
What I want is software and systems to not suck ass. I don't want to deal with defective... everything, because it was faster to deliver. That's especially true when it contributes to the death or injury of a person that didn't do anything wrong.
I don't care what works, but people being afraid of going to jail for hurting someone absolutely does work. And 'administrative fines' don't work.