Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 days ago
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast
> what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations?
Did they have documented problems?
This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM. Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances. But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to repeat.
Same thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being out, I would presume.
Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.
Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.
At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to everyone to be incapable of basic iteration. There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
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