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SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

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Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#81

Post by joshribakoff »

jsnell wrote: post #72
macinjosh wrote: post #42

I don't understand all the debate. The _law_ is that when an emergency vehicle is behind you, you pull over to the side and make as much room as you can in the center of the road. The vehicle did not move out of the way, the company should be penalized heavily, as would a human driver.

Sure. What's the penalty for a human driver in that situation? Is it having the SFFD lie to the press about the events and imply you caused somebody's death? If the story were "Cruise fined $5k for not yielding to an emergency vehicle quickly enough", I bet the tenor of the conversation would be totally different.

A human likely wouldn’t sit there failing to move over with an ambulance honking and blaring its sirens so this hypothetical is ridiculous, and the media isn’t slandering them by reporting on the incident. No one knows “what would have happened” for certain, and the headline only implies the mere possibility of causation (for anyone literate who reads it)

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#82

Post by shepardrtc »

bee_rider wrote: post #73

The whole description is pretty confusing, I hope video is shared at some point so we can understand it a little better. I’m sure they (Cruise as well as the city) don’t want to dump it on the general public immediately for good reasons, but hopefully we’ll see it eventually. > A stalled Cruise robotaxi blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle to the hospital in an Aug. 14 incident…

> Why weren’t those people pulling over, like you are supposed to when you encounter an ambulance in a rush (presumably with sirens on)?

Because they didn't care about the person in the ambulance.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#83

Post by Waterluvian »

threatofrain wrote: post #79
Waterluvian wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drives me mad when there’s armchair bickering about “well you could have just done X.” Doesn’t matter. If there’s a law about getting out of the way, offering maximum space and choices to emergency vehicles, and you didn’t do that, you failed and you broke the law. One can definitely bicker about the details, but it doesn’t change anything about the fact that the vehicle failed to obey the law.

> Doesn’t matter. If there’s a law about getting out of the way, offering maximum space and choices to emergency vehicles, and you didn’t do that, you failed and you broke the law. Then we can talk about whether the vehicle operator failed to obey the law, but I think we're talking about something far more serious, which is whether Cruise indirectly killed a man. In determining whether Cruise has moral responsibility…

Yeah, not going to argue the lightning rod of a headline even if it was careful not to actually say “Cruise killed a man.”

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#84

Post by spondylosaurus »

slg wrote: post #75
perihelions wrote: post #62

- "blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle" I'm taking no "position" on either "side" of the debate, but I feel it's noteworthy that a *human-driven* car killed a pedestrian (seriously?) here, and that fact is utterly banal and completely unremarkable to the authors—and to us. AI cars are still highly flawed and kill people. Human-driven cars are highly flawed, probably more flawe…

This is an excellent point. There are two independent causes to this person's death. 1. A human driver grievously injured a pedestrian 2. An AI driver delayed medical care for the injured pedestrian That person is potentially still alive if 2 doesn't happen. They are certainly still alive if 1 doesn't happen. Therefore, 1 deserves more of the blame here. Considering these are two independent causes, we can still be u…

I disagree that 1 deserves more of the blame here—a blocked ambulance is blocked from attending to all medical emergencies, not just medical emergencies caused by (human-powered) car accidents.

If the robotaxi had blocked the ambulance from reaching someone who'd just had a stroke, blame would rest 100% on the robotaxi. And there's no telling that this won't happen again.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#85

Post by nobodyandproud »

pjscott wrote: post #66
robswc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think Cruise's responses to stuck cars needs work but problems with emergency vehicles and drivers happens all the time. I remember an ambulance was right behind me at an intersection. The right turning lane was free but it was right behind me. I got really uncomfortable because I had 0 idea what to do, if I was supposed to basically break the law and go into the intersection on red so that it could get by. Afte…

Yeah, this is the thing that bothers me about people's response to robo-taxis. They're not compared to human drivers, who make mistakes all the time. They're compared to a theoretical ideal of perfection, and people get outraged when they inevitably fall short. The problems with the status quo are easy to overlook, just a normal part of life that everybody has come to accept -- but the problems with any attempted cha…

The counter-position: Civil and criminally-negligent accountability for robo-taxis are unproven, untested, and unclear.

Being corporate-owned and run, who goes to prison for vehicular negligence? Will fines be collected and too many violations lead to revocation of license?

When accidents with autonomous cars are blamed on humans (and they are), why are key details like inhuman and unexpected behavior by the autonomous car omitted?

People are acting rationally here.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#86

Post by 88913527 »

perihelions wrote: post #62

- "blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle" I'm taking no "position" on either "side" of the debate, but I feel it's noteworthy that a *human-driven* car killed a pedestrian (seriously?) here, and that fact is utterly banal and completely unremarkable to the authors—and to us. AI cars are still highly flawed and kill people. Human-driven cars are highly flawed, probably more flawe…

Kind of hard to assign liability to some matrix algebra that unfortunately did some computations that were suboptimal given the conditions. If these costs add up, it turns into a tragedy of the commons type of problem. A more modern form of the "corporations can pollute but don't pay the costs".

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#87

Post by joshribakoff »

flandish wrote: post #52

Corp robotics aside - any of this kind of tech needs to 100% have the ability to get out of the way. By robotic control. Bu human control. Or by being pushed. 90 seconds before ambulance moves is not long at all. Quite fast actually. I’ve seen it be longer for things with an MOI that requires ambulance to landing zone for helicopter transport. With helis waiting. The people in this thread simping for the tech while a…

The only way this will happen (anytime soon) is if they put the safety drivers back in but they will never do that willingly because they have worked for a decade and invested billions to get to this point and it would be difficult to capitulate. There is simply no way to remotely assist reliably in the same way as being physically present (no network has 0 latency and 100% reliability). The AI likely cannot drive “perfectly” no matter how good it gets and neither can humans, but for the foreseeable future the AI will continue making entirely different type of mistakes than humans do.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#88

Post by shepardrtc »

jedberg wrote: post #60
blincoln wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the safe default assumption is that if the ambulance driver didn't use the right lane, there was probably a good reason. Clearly the firetruck driver agreed with them. Maybe traffic was moving so quickly that they'd have to accelerate hard and risk hurting the patient, or they were concerned about getting rear-ended. Regardless, Cruise's vehicle clearly was at fault for not getting out of the way.

If there was a reason that the ambulance didn't move right, then wouldn't that same reason exist preventing the taxi from moving right? Even moreso since they don't have lights and sirens like the ambulance?

In many places it's illegal to pass on the right. I assume the driver probably didn't want to get disciplined.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#89

Post by falcolas »

gkoberger wrote: post #56

This is such a weird framing. The person (a pedestrian) died because a car driven by a human hit them. There was also a human-driven police car that was also blocking the ambulance. I don't think the Cruise made this situation better, but it was a human-driven car that caused the death. And as far as I could find, Cruise has never hit a human.

If you shoot a gun out your window and kill someone who jumped off the building, you are still on the hook for manslaughter.

That is to say, Cruise is still on the hook, even if they didn’t hit the pedestrian in the first place.

Re: SF Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

#90

Post by doublerabbit »

slg wrote: post #75
perihelions wrote: post #62

- "blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle" I'm taking no "position" on either "side" of the debate, but I feel it's noteworthy that a *human-driven* car killed a pedestrian (seriously?) here, and that fact is utterly banal and completely unremarkable to the authors—and to us. AI cars are still highly flawed and kill people. Human-driven cars are highly flawed, probably more flawe…

This is an excellent point. There are two independent causes to this person's death. 1. A human driver grievously injured a pedestrian 2. An AI driver delayed medical care for the injured pedestrian That person is potentially still alive if 2 doesn't happen. They are certainly still alive if 1 doesn't happen. Therefore, 1 deserves more of the blame here. Considering these are two independent causes, we can still be u…

Equal blame to both.

Both of them caused death. One by causing the potential death and the other stopping the remediation of death.

The difference is you can sentence a person. A robot, not such.

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