this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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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.
I'd argue they need to fuck up less than the alternative means of transport that we could be transitioning to if we weren't so dead-set on being car dependent. So dead-set, in fact, that we are allowing ourselves to be made complacent; by billion-dollar companies that peddle entirely new technology to excuse the death and destruction to our environment and social fabric that they've wrought upon us and continue to perpetuate; instead of us demanding new iterations of the old, safer, more affordable, more efficient, but unfortunately less profitable tech that our country sold out to those same monied interests for them to dismantle.
I mean, I'm on board with the fuck-cars reasoning, but also recognize that we'll never make it happen except by our own extinction. And we're speedrunning that shit. Let's take whatever improvements we can realistically get, be it cars or whatever else, and hit what's left of Earth's ability to support life as comfortably as possible. If that includes running over fewer people by using R2D2 to cart us around vs our own monkey brains... cool! If it's something better, extra cool! I'll take progress wherever I can get it.
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 think the hook of the story is people backing the not alive and not conscious vehicle instead of the injured, alive and conscious human.
I'm all for automating transportation, but if the importance of that convenience outweighs our ability to empathize, we're in for a real sad century.
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
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.
Here's a picture of one driving around a couple weeks ago
From your first article.
From your second.
Your third article doesn't provide any numbers, but it's not about fully autonomous vehicles anyway.
In short, if you're going to claim that their track record is actually worse than humans, you need to provide some actual evidence.
Edit: Here's a recent New Scientist article claiming that driverless cars "generally demonstrate better safety than human drivers in most scenarios" even though they perform worse in turns, for example.
If you just look a pure numbers, sure, you can make it sound good. When you go look at the types of accidents, it's pretty damning. Waymo and Cruise both have a history of hitting parked cars and emergency vehicles. Tesla Autopilot is notorious for accelerating at the back of parked emergency vehicles.
The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.
I'm not personally against self driving cars once they're actually as competent as a human in determining their surroundings, but we're not there yet.
As long as the overall number of injuries/deaths is lower for autonomous vehicles (and as you've acknowledged, that does seem to be what the data shows), I don't care how "stupid" autonomous vehicles' accidents are. Not to mention that their safety records will only improve as they get more time on the roads.