Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

mysanantonio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 220 posts

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#171

Post by zadikian »

tt24 wrote: post #105
pigbearpig wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. The problem is the Waymo that is blocking a lane sideways and is not pulling forward out of the way of the ambulance, a move that even the worst human drivers would likely know to do. It does no good to pretend there aren't problems with self-driving cars or make excuses. It's not about the other entities.

Why are we focusing on entity A when the parent comment correctly pointed out entities B and C are not blameless either?

The other drivers are blameless. They did what they were supposed to.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#172

Post by pimlottc »

comrh wrote: post #24

Isn't it making an illegal u-turn over a double yellow line?

I honestly think u-turns should be illegal is most situations. They are highly unpredictable and block multiple lanes of traffic for the benefit of a single vehicle. It’s especially unnecessary for a GPS-guided vehicle that should easily be able to determine an alternate route.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#173

Post by grayhatter »

gruez wrote: post #135
grayhatter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. This just feels like the "we should make the justice system harsher to deter crime" argument…

> This just feels like the "we should make the justice system harsher to deter crime" argument but applied to software engineering.

Ignore that feeling, it's wrong. Because it's not what I'm arguing for. Reasonable is a load bearing qualifier.

It doesn't feel like the people making the decisions that meaningfully contribute to causing harm to other people, ever have to deal with the fallout or repercussions for their unfortunate choices. Deincentivizing that behavior is my goal. And I'll unfortunately take iterative or suboptimal options at this point. I don't like it, but I do want to try to be realistic.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#174

Post by [deleted] »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #154
tapoxi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is the key. Personally I think you just have to something similar to an auditor or whatever. Demand that if a self driving taxi operates in your city, they assign one legally responsible person per $major-division-of-city. All accidents in that region are due to that guy. Naturally, this will incentivise them to improve the system that deals with edge cases in their ML model, and better yet you'll have the legal…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#175

Post by abenga »

wnevets wrote: post #38
tapoxi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

We've had this ever since Corporations were invented.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#176

Post by kyleee »

gbin wrote: post #115

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. I am sorry I am out.

It’s so perplexing to hear about people seeing ads - do you really not use an ad blocking solution?

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#177

Post by NewJazz »

bsder wrote: post #149
NewJazz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would actually be great. Some kind of eye brow raise, a gesture, any recognition/indication that it perceives a life to preserve.

Erm, have you ever taken a Waymo and watched the detection screen? If you can see it, it sees you. Period. I guarantee it. It can see and gives special priority to humans. I have watched it mark people at night that I couldn't see at all. Doing weird shit on the road? Certainly possible. Missing seeing a human? Definitely not happening.

Just because someone knows that logically, doesn't mean that it reassures them in the moment.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#178

Post by kyleee »

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…

Maybe there is a new product for a little robot on a leash that you send out into traffic and any autonomous vehicles will stop, and then you can proceed safely.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#179

Post by runamok »

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…

I think of the corporate death penalty as being more appropriate when leadership knew exactly what was going on and chose profits over people. Exxon, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063. Purdue Pharma, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma. Company gets sold for parts and Cauitebgoes to prison probably for life due to the amount of lives they potentially destroyed. Pretty much all the tobacco companies knew how harmful their product and made a concerted effort to fund their own bogus studies to throw up a smoke screen. Facebook makes billions from (for example) scams and fraudulent ads: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu.... Maybe don't throw their CEO in prison but at least fine them 10x the profit they made vs. the usual .0001%.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#180

Post by phyzix5761 »

thwarted wrote: post #126
phyzix5761 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people have no idea what they're invested in. Most are invested in mutual funds through their work or 401k. My point isn't that we shouldn't hold people accountable. My point is that going after owners/shareholders is not the solution we want because it hurts people who have nothing to do with what happened. We need to go after executives.
Post reply on HN