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San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

latimes.com

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Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#91

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Projectiboga wrote: post #60
rurp wrote: post #20

The specific examples listed out in the article are egregious, causing real harm. The fire chief is right to be angry, if anything her response is too measured. From the article: - Running through yellow emergency tape and ignoring warning signs to enter a street strewn with storm-damaged electrical wires, then driving past emergency vehicles with some of those wires snarled around rooftop lidar sensors. - Twice bloc…

Time for Zero Tolerance, if one of these do it seize it, and levy the robotaxi company and whomever built it with Huge Fines. Not "oh that will just be another expense", make it that those fines pierce the corporate veil and get to the executives and the millionaire shareholders. And now that I think of it, if there are any passengers, arrest them. That way they can sue the RoboTaxi company too.

> Time for Zero Tolerance, if one of these do it seize it, and levy the robotaxi company and whomever built it with Huge Fines

This is certainly in San Francisco’s tradition. Given the economic depression those policy’s are putting it in, one might wonder if chasing away this industry, too, is smart in the long run.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#92

Post by 7952 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #50

Seems to me a simple regulation like a fire department access in buildings could solve this. eg1: What about a direct line to a 24/7 operations center with cruise? eg2: Or how about a proximal access console controller that allows them to take control of the the vehicle (with occupants consent if occupied) . This neednt be a total ban on AVs

That seems like a solution in an emergency, but these kind of interactions must happen all the time. And it is part of a wider problem where the baseline data about the world changes and not communicated in a standardised way. It could be a fire truck, road closure for cycling event, tornado ripping through a town, a terrorist attack, a secret service motorcade, oil on the road, anything. And dealing with those situations is much easier with that data. Making that data explicit could help everyone, not just self driving cars.

It would be useful if vehicles with sirens/emergency lights/hazard lights could broadcast position and identity in a similar way to ADS-B. Make data open and allow third parties to forward, store and re-broadcast that data. Make the consumer of the data (such as a self driving car) responsible for how it uses that data.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#93

Post by c00lio »

jeffbee wrote: post #74
c00lio wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, then the US is a very strange place. I'm European, so forgive my ignorance in those matters, I thought things worked similarly over there.

LOL no. Personally I look upon the Swiss "via sicura" regime wistfully. I want people who speed through central cities to go to jail and have their cars crushed.

You won't immediately loose your license for speeding, even in Switzerland. Afaik it'll be expensive until 20km/h over, only after that will the really nasty things like criminal prosecution and car impound start (for first-time offenders, repeat offenders are punished more harshly).

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#94

Post by swayvil »

jokoon wrote: post #35

It's weird, I'm a developer, and I really want AI to work, but it just doesn't, so I'm just generally against AI in general. And it seems it's far, far from working properly. It's difficult to see domains where AI can really improve productivity without having major drawbacks. I'm not against research on AI, but as long as science cannot define what intelligence really is, I guess AI will not make major advances.

It's almost as if navigating reality requires something better than logic and maps. Like humans have magic eyeballs or something.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#95

Post by vostrocity »

nycdatasci wrote: post #67

The incidents in the article are inexcusable. But to be fair, I manually reviewed a dozen accident reports on the CA state website and 100% were due to human error in other vehicles or due to issues with an operator of an AI vehicle in manual mode: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Dang, was it common knowledge that Apple is testing its autonomous driving tech on public roads? I had no idea!

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#97

Post by masswerk »

phpisthebest wrote: post #41
crote wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human did this, they would probably be arrested and lose their driver's license. Stuff like this is something you just can't do . But self-driving cars get away with it because we haven't figured out how to hold them responsible yet.

>>self-driving cars get away with it because we haven't figured out how to hold them responsible yet. We have a liability model in place. Fine the company

This may not work out, as the fines may be lower than the costs of development to address the underlying issues, while it's at the same time all about basic safety of the community. (The fines would have to be higher than the cost of "oops, we have to employ human safety drivers and put them into every car.")

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#98

Post by s1gsegv »

dylan604 wrote: post #31
pixel3234 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per driving license. It already works like that with truck driver and other professional drivers. They may have 5x more accidents than normal person, but they drive 20x more miles.

Truck drivers are individual people making discrete decisions. A robocar company all uses the same training data to make the same results. Put 10 different human drivers in the same situation, you'd expect a variance of decisions being made. Put 10 robocars in the same situation, you'd expect 1 decision being made. Is this not how they are being tested? Am I crazy to assume this?

Absolutely, however holding the entire fleet responsible for the number of faults that would disqualify a single driver also seems wrong. If a taxi driver drives 8 hours a day, then 10 robotaxis will drive 80 hours in that same day and statistically be subject to perform 10x the number of faults, if we're holding them to the same standard.

Now, if 12 points loses your license, you have 10 cars, and rack up 120 points across the fleet, it seems obvious that on the whole the fleet is performing worse than a fleet of human drivers we would otherwise ban.

Not an easy problem, to be sure. On one hand, companies can't be allowed free reign to clog up the roads and cause havoc without consequence. On the other, if we NIMBY the development too much, we will be stuck behind countries that don't. In my opinion, we're near the right balance but probably need to take some short term action to make it clear to companies that a remedy for the current behavior around emergency vehicles needs to be priority 0.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

HankB99 wrote: post #26

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the US legal system as part of a solution. If a robo-taxi causes material harm, sue the operator for some multiple of the cost of the harm. I suppose the drawback to this strategy is that real harm has to happen first and that could easily involve loss of life or limb, but perhaps the threat of that would be enough to motivate the robo-taxi providers to fix the problem.

> If a robo-taxi causes material harm, sue the operator for some multiple of the cost of the harm.

There haven’t been many cases of actual harm. This article pretty much lists out situations which could cause harm but didn’t, due to factors out of the operator’s or fire department’s control.

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