Comment by rdiddly
11 hours ago
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
11 hours ago
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US.
It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.
Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.
https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.
Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
>By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation.
1. [citation needed]
2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and the whole transportation system is net zero, but that doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than the utopian solution, even though they're better than the status quo of conventional ICE cars.
Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.
The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).
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I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving around.
American roads are uniquely dangerous for passengers in cars and for pedestrians compared to other developed countries..
Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:
build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and
train drivers to show respect for other people on the road
However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.
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The difference is those human-driven cars all have a driver who can be held accountable.
If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail. If a Waymo or otherwise kills someone, who’s going to jail?
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Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.
The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
I count 14 countries higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
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> No one seems sufficiently outraged
Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough of it?
I've seen plenty but about the wrong things.
Why would I be, when I don’t have any standard for comparison.
How many human drivers did similar because the power went out?
> a private company's equipment blocked the public roads
That would be like every traffic incident ever? I don't think US has public cars or state-owned utilities.
My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city. That seems new or historically rare. I understand large scale deployment will find new system design flaws so I’m not outraged, but I do think we should consider what this means for us, if anything.
>My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city.
That's hardly new. What do you think happens to traffic when a semi flips over on a busy interstate, or electricity goes out, turning all traffic lights into 4 way stops and severely limiting throughput?
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I think the blog is strongly hinting us to focus on the real problem -- the electrical utility and I have to agree.
The only other option I can think of is to build some kind of high density low power solar powered IoT network that is independent of current infrastructure but then where is the spectrum for that?
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Typically people move aside for emergency vehicles
Ask any EMT or paramedic - an astonishingly large proportion of human drivers panic in the presence of an ambulance and just slam their brakes on.
On the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling" at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance curiosity.
Based. Anyone complaining about HN being "insufficiently outraged" should go to Twitter and never return.
I was actually wondering more about the people whose streets they are. Didn't mean to indicate that I or anyone cares what HN thinks.