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Comment by victorbojica

3 days ago

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?

    • > Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience.

      Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because…

      > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.

      And they don’t, it’s chaos.

      > Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?

      You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it is not the other way around for those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is that Waymo can get better with experience and humans generally don’t.

      3 replies →

    • Developing new technologies has risks. In the absence of anything really bad actually happening, I think we can solve the problem by adding new requirements to Waymo's operating license (and all self driving cars) rather than kneecapping the technology.