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

Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 813 posts

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#671

Post by padjo »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #559
naet wrote: post #549

We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control. Surprised at how many comments he…

It's going to sound batshit insane what I say - the problem is, if we don't praise company PR, the other side will use this as an excuse to push even harder regulations, not allow them in newer cities, slow down the adoption rate, while factually ignoring that this is just a safer method of transport. I wish I was not a bootlicker, but I really want robotaxis to be available everywhere in the world at some point, and…

You're right, what you're saying is batshit insane.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#672

Post by padjo »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #625
naet wrote: post #549

We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control. Surprised at how many comments he…

Do you know anyone who works at Waymo? The cynicism is silly. Just because some people at some companies behave horribly, it doesn't mean all or even most do. Look at Waymo's history in the space, meet some of the people working there, then make a decision.

You don't have to think anyone is behaving horribly to acknowledge that a company's PR department will tend to put out the version of the story that makes them look best.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#673

Post by padjo »

kj4211cash wrote: post #637

It's interesting how polarized this comments section is. Lots of people claiming a human driver would definitely have been driving slower. Lots of people claiming statistics show that human drivers do worse in this scenario aggregate. Of course neither side presenting convincing evidence.

And a truly disappointing number of people just accepting company PR as a complete account.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#674

Post by xyst »

naet wrote: post #549

We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control. Surprised at how many comments he…

One of the few seeing through Waymo PR bullshit.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#675

Post by Dylan16807 »

Marsymars wrote: post #663
Dylan16807 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking away licenses is a bad way to enforce driving rules because so many people have to be able to drive or their life collapses. The problems of aggressive license revocation are similar to the problems of aggressive prison time.

I get where you're coming from, but it's pretty hard to be sympathetic given the crimes we're talking about and the impact they have on others. Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses". Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairment…

> Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses".

The analogy is closer to "take away their ability to get any job" and then it sounds even more harsh.

> Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.

If you can't see well enough to drive, then life was unfair to you, and you can often get help with transportation that isn't available to someone that violated the law. For age, if you're young then your parents are supposed to care for you, if you're too old to drive you're supposed to have figured out your retirement by now. For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas. And it's not ugly to make the comparison to extreme poverty, to say that kicking someone down to that level is a very severe punishment.

> must allow

I wasn't saying what we should do, just that turning up the aggressiveness has serious unwanted consequences.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#676

Post by dyauspitr »

padjo wrote: post #671
tokioyoyo wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to sound batshit insane what I say - the problem is, if we don't praise company PR, the other side will use this as an excuse to push even harder regulations, not allow them in newer cities, slow down the adoption rate, while factually ignoring that this is just a safer method of transport. I wish I was not a bootlicker, but I really want robotaxis to be available everywhere in the world at some point, and…

You're right, what you're saying is batshit insane.

It’s not honestly, it’s the unspoken political battle being constantly fought over all kinds of things.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#677

Post by [deleted] »

belorn wrote: post #469
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#678

Post by catlikesshrimp »

sowbug wrote: post #268
Rudybega wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably more a function of more people being in the road than people not understanding what object they're about to hit.

Sorry, I was being oblique. Humans kill other humans with cars every day. They kill even more on Halloween. Let's start addressing that problem before worrying whether Waymos might someday decide it's OK to drive through ghosts. Autonomous vehicles won't be perfect. They'll surely make different mistakes from the ones humans currently make. People will die who wouldn't have died at the hands of human drivers. But the…

"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?"

This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#679

Post by tokioyoyo »

padjo wrote: post #671
tokioyoyo wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to sound batshit insane what I say - the problem is, if we don't praise company PR, the other side will use this as an excuse to push even harder regulations, not allow them in newer cities, slow down the adoption rate, while factually ignoring that this is just a safer method of transport. I wish I was not a bootlicker, but I really want robotaxis to be available everywhere in the world at some point, and…

You're right, what you're saying is batshit insane.

I understand it sounds stupid, but there was huge push back for introducing Uber to the cities I lived in. And obviously this is even bigger change. However, if a private company is willing to foot the bill, go above and beyond to prove its usefulness and safety, I will be repping for it.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#680

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #507
belorn wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…

It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.

Those things all sound easy to remove in some hypothetical future where there are enough and safe enough self driving cars to have both. Makes sense to design for human driven cars for now though.
Post reply on HN