Live data from Hacker News

Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

bbc.co.uk

91–94 of 94 posts

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#91

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

It's interesting how quickly we've gone from discussing an interesting failure mode of autonomous robots that travel in public spaces, and switched to calling it PEBKAC. This is a unironically a great signal society is willing to accept self driving cars. Even computer security isn't this good at playing blame the user.

"Society" didn't blame the user, I think "society" would have no problem blaming the car. Hacker News isn't representative of society at large.

The signal you're seeing is the tendency of tech people to consider any risk to human safety to be less important than the benefits of the technology itself, and to always blame the human and never the tech.

You also see this manifest in any conversation about the failure modes of AI, in the inevitable knee-jerk response of "humans also do x."

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#92
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem? The guy kept filming for under sixteen seconds after asking about and receiving clarification that she is unable to intervene with the car and needs him to use the app. I like the idea that this somehow indicates bad faith or ineptitude in your estimation.

I've also never missed a flight by 16 seconds, so it is interesting that this chap is worried about missing his flight because of a brief delay?

[deleted]

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ride in a car It's riding in a robot with no reliable safety fencing. This is the mayhem these companies are subjecting the general public to.

What's mayhem is humans driving. This is downright calm by comparison. Inconvenient, sure, but it's not Mad Max, he's just slowly circling. He didn't even miss his flight.

This makes sense. If one thing is bad, another somewhat similar thing is good. Being trapped in a moving vehicle without a driver is not bad because being in a vehicle with a person is bad. Similarly getting hit with a brick is not bad because getting hit with a shovel is bad.

Re: Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah totes fake drama. Like 90% of our news. Even the weather is like all drama "atmospheric cyclone tsunami" and ends up as light rain with some flooding, like last year.

Maybe for you—we were devastated by two hurricanes last year

I survived multiple "atmospheric rivers" unscathed.

And a super typhoon on vacation.

Post reply on HN