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Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

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Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#81

Post by kelvinjps10 »

gruez wrote: post #77
aaomidi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not too hard to implement them with cryptographic protocols to prevent duplication and apply time/location restrictions to them. Moreover if you really wanted to steal a car, there are much easier ways of doing that, like buying a replica gun on aliexpress then going to your nearest intersection.

The problem is not really that they can get stolen, but remote control, like a bad person gaining access to the car to hit people or something like that.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#82

Post by gruez »

AngryData wrote: post #78
gruez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#83

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

fragmede wrote: post #27
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…

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 problems, because drivers are collectively quite intolerant of the pedestrians and especially cyclists they share the road with. There is a lot of pedestrian and cyclist behaviour that is curtailed by motorist bullying, which autonomous cars don't really do. (Your walking in front of them being a fine example)

Things like cyclists "taking the lane" are deeply unpopular despite being entirely legal and good road safety practice. Increased rollout of AVs will only make this more prevalent and then you'll have a whole new demographic of angry people mad that their waymo is slow because it's behind a cyclist.

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#84

Post by wongarsu »

orliesaurus wrote: post #40

Someone on Austin's subreddit said the following and I think it's the correct take/lens: > I might get downvoted for expressing my feelings but whatever. I hate seeing my coworkers being ridiculed for simply doing the right thing and moving on with their work. I’ve been abused and called an idiot on here for stating our reality. I’m a paramedic. We will NOT attempt to move or hit a vehicle, person, or object to go to…

He makes an excellent job describing all lots of systematic issues here

- a collision causes an investigation that is "not worth it"

- even in this case that was "high profile, tragic, and absolutely dire"

- vehicles, objects, or people get in paramedics' or EMTs' way on a daily basis, apparently without consequences

- EMTs are subject to high levels of verbal abuse and assaults, apparently without consequences

- yet they are the ones under constant scrutiny

Now don't get me wrong, I am not against oversight. But compare this with American cops, who seem authorized to do far more damage to vehicles and people for often far less immediate benefit, have much laxer oversight, and do not have to endure abuse without recourse (well, technically they do have to do that, but it's not advisable to test this)

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#85

Post by gruez »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #81
gruez wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not too hard to implement them with cryptographic protocols to prevent duplication and apply time/location restrictions to them. Moreover if you really wanted to steal a car, there are much easier ways of doing that, like buying a replica gun on aliexpress then going to your nearest intersection.

The problem is not really that they can get stolen, but remote control, like a bad person gaining access to the car to hit people or something like that.

>like a bad person gaining access to the car to hit people or something like that.

That can be eliminated by not giving direct control and something closer to what Waymo "Remote Assistance Agents" have access to: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#86

Post by himata4113 »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #70
himata4113 wrote: post #43

Everyone is downvoted in the comments 80% are grey? Even the ones that sound perfectly reasonable? Upvoted one and it was still greyed out which makes me think there's more to it, but maybe I am missing something really obvious.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've been on the site for years and have never seen something like that even with heated topics, the guidelines are there as a guide, but this was completely out of the ordinary (at least for me).

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#87

Post by wnevets »

gruez wrote: post #72
wnevets wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> No, at the very least tort laws still apply even if the driver is a corporation.

Do they?

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#88

Post by dangero »

NewJazz wrote: post #18
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…

Humans will continue to have a hard time accepting this tradeoff. Are you asserting that humans should accept these, currently not fully known, tradeoffs?

If it results in less deaths then it seems likely to me

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#89

Post by gruez »

smeggysmeg wrote: post #80
gruez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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 code[1] that unintentionally kills someone? What do you do? Jail the programmer who wrote the code? Jail the manager who did the code review? Jail the CEO who had no knowledge of it but "buck stops with him" and we hate CEOs? How does the death penalty work? If you think it through it's basically a fine equivalent to the company's market cap. If Boeing does a bad that kills one person, does that mean the US government just repossesses the entire company?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Re: Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

#90

Post by sashank_1509 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #29

I've never understood why everyone acts like this is some bizarre legal quagmire. If I make a robot and it goes and kills someone, nobody sits around navel gazing wondering how they're going to prosecute a robot. If I make a device that pulls the trigger of a gun aimed at someone tied to a chair when I click a button on my cell phone, or something green appears in the camera attached to the device, or time reaches 11…

This is ridiculous. We don’t send surgeons to jail if they mistakenly kill their patient.
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