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Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

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Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#121

Post by heisenzombie »

gruez wrote: post #89
smeggysmeg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Australia it's the board of directors who are liable. They can be liable if they personally direct the company to do something illegal (obviously?) but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public. Directors can be personally liable for breaches of this duty and the penalties extend to possible imprisonment and very substantial fines.

For example: https://www.owhsp.qld.gov.au/court-report/fines-imposed-fail...

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#122

Post by cameldrv »

tapoxi wrote: post #22
mxfh wrote: post #8

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…

You can arrest a driver for not making space for an emergency vehicle. Who do we arrest here?

Since corporations are people, presumably you’d arrest Waymo.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#123

Post by plagiarist »

gruez wrote: post #82
AngryData wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone sitting in jail doesn't help solve the problem, then maybe we should remove the jail penalty to for individuals that do it.

>then maybe we should remove the jail penalty to for individuals that do it. We don't send everyone to jail either. You can run over people and get away scot free, if it's an honest mistake and you weren't being negligent.

Or if you were being negligent but due to affluenza.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#124

Post by grayhatter »

aaomidi wrote: post #65
escapegoat wrote: post #44

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.

And every single day you hear about someone abusing them right? Or no?

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#125

Post by plagiarist »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #118
plagiarist wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, let's go. Prorated in terms of their percentage of ownership, of course. Put them in jail for a few seconds as well.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#126

Post by thwarted »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #118
plagiarist wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This position that no wrongdoing or illegal action can be discouraged because someone has to eat, or because it's "regular people" who have accountability because of who they decided to have manage their investments is getting old. Accountability has been diluted so much that no one is accountable. What about the people who are harmed, the victims, your grandparents, teachers, all sorts of regular people. Nothing is going to get better if we're constantly looking for the most appropriate person to place blame on. Maybe people should be paying more attention to the things they invest in/own.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#128

Post by plagiarist »

usefulcat wrote: post #119
wnevets wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It might be possible. Would have to be by someone who hadn't signed the binding arbitration, though.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#129

Post by gruez »

heisenzombie wrote: post #121
gruez wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In Australia it's the board of directors who are liable. They can be liable if they personally direct the company to do something illegal (obviously?) but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public. Directors can be personally liable for breaches of this duty and the penalties extend to possible imprisonmen…

>but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public.

Is there any indication this requirement was breached for this case? I'm all for jailing executives of companies where they specifically failed to enact safety measures, or even didn't care enough about safety, but in this case it's simply a case of a edge they didn't test. It's not for lack of trying either. Apparently they have their own AI model to generate test data, so they can train/test what happens if a hurricane hits, for instance.

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

In this case it just sounds like the thought process was

> waymo did a bad

> someone doing the same would be arrested (?)

> therefore somebody needs to be arrested

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#130

Post by AngryData »

ibejoeb wrote: post #30
dangero wrote: post #14

The problem we will encounter with self driving cars is that while they will make less mistakes than humans, they will make different mistakes. Humans will continue to have a hard time accepting this tradeoff. I live in LA where Waymos are now on every street. My experience is that they don’t respect human courtesy, so for example if I need to cross a lane of busy traffic, a human may brake as a courtesy to let me th…

That courtesy is almost always bad practice and is generally unlawful. You must yield right of way to a pedestrian at a legal crossing, but california has codes that prohibit impeding normal traffic flow, including stopping in the street to wave across a pedestrian where there is no such crossing. It's especially dangerous on multi-lane roads because the stopped vehicle can blind the pedestrian to other traffic.

I would dispute saying it is almost always bad practice. Sometimes it is, people do dumb stuff, but in many cases it solves problems before they become a problem to start with because most humans are pretty good at predicting how others around them will react.

Stopping in the middle of the road to save a pedestrian 3 seconds while costing 5 cars on the road to wait 10 seconds is obviously dumb, but what about recognizing the gap near you in the line of cars is the only gap around for the pedestrian waiting ahead, and either slowing down or speeding up a little bit to open that gap wider which makes everybody safer and eliminates any real braking events.

You might not notice all the things people do now to make traffic move smoothly, either intentionally or not, but something as simple as a line of robot cars spreading out on a road can cause problems when traffic levels that normally leave large gaps for easier left turns, pedestrians, poor visibility crossings, etc, instead becomes a steady spaced stream of traffic that has to be disrupted to fit those other options. Very small things can result in large traffic bottlenecks. Humans aren't immune to it, we cause out own problems with things like traffic waves, but we also solve many problems ourselves without really thinking about it.

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