While many social media users are blaming the pedestrian for reportedly crossing against the light, the incident highlights the challenge autonomous driving faces in complex situations.
How does “driverless cars hitting people is so incredibly rare that a single instance of it immediately becomes international news” at all signify “boring dystopia”? If anything we should be ecstatic that the technology to eliminate the vast majority of car deaths is so close and seems to be working so well.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of ridiculously, insanely amazing.
Exactly. As early as the technology still is, it seems like it’s already orders of magnitude better than human drivers.
I guess the arbitrary/unfeeling impression of driverless car deaths bothers people more than the “it was just an accident” impression of human-caused deaths. Personally, as long as driverless car deaths are significantly rarer than human-caused deaths (and it already seems like they are much, much rarer), I’d rather take the lower chance of dying in a car accident, but that’s just me.
I think the problem right now is that driverless cars are still way worse than human drivers in a lot of edge cases. And buffalo buffalo buffalo when you have so many people driving every day you end up with a lot of edge cases.
That’s probably true, but their handling of edge cases will only get better the more time they spend on the roads, and it already looks like they’re significantly safer than humans under normal circumstances, which make up the vast majority of the time spent on the road.
I see you’re not familiar with the trend of autonomous vehicles hitting pedestrians and parked cars. They’ve been completely banned They were suspended from San Francisco after many, many incidents. So far their track is inferior to humans (see Tesla Autopilot, Waymo, and Cruise), so you don’t need to worry about perfect.
As someone who was literally just in San Fran, the driverless cars are not only a thing, but they’re booked out days in advance so idk where you’re getting your info from
I was in 2 of them in Phoenix. June 18th/19th est time. Took one home from the bar, and one to go pick up the rental car from the bar to drop off at the air port.
How does “driverless cars hitting people is so incredibly rare that a single instance of it immediately becomes international news” at all signify “boring dystopia”? If anything we should be ecstatic that the technology to eliminate the vast majority of car deaths is so close and seems to be working so well.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of ridiculously, insanely amazing.
Yeah that was my thought too… driverless cars don’t need to never fuck up, they need to fuck up less than humans do. And we fuck up a LOT.
Exactly. As early as the technology still is, it seems like it’s already orders of magnitude better than human drivers.
I guess the arbitrary/unfeeling impression of driverless car deaths bothers people more than the “it was just an accident” impression of human-caused deaths. Personally, as long as driverless car deaths are significantly rarer than human-caused deaths (and it already seems like they are much, much rarer), I’d rather take the lower chance of dying in a car accident, but that’s just me.
I think the problem right now is that driverless cars are still way worse than human drivers in a lot of edge cases. And buffalo buffalo buffalo when you have so many people driving every day you end up with a lot of edge cases.
That’s probably true, but their handling of edge cases will only get better the more time they spend on the roads, and it already looks like they’re significantly safer than humans under normal circumstances, which make up the vast majority of the time spent on the road.
I see you’re not familiar with the trend of autonomous vehicles hitting pedestrians and parked cars.
They’ve been completely bannedThey were suspended from San Francisco after many, many incidents. So far their track is inferior to humans (see Tesla Autopilot, Waymo, and Cruise), so you don’t need to worry about perfect.As someone who was literally just in San Fran, the driverless cars are not only a thing, but they’re booked out days in advance so idk where you’re getting your info from
They were suspended last year. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/technology/cruise-driverless-san-francisco-suspended.html
I was in 2 of them in Phoenix. June 18th/19th est time. Took one home from the bar, and one to go pick up the rental car from the bar to drop off at the air port.