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Comment by alanwatts | Hacker News Reader

>You'd just make everyone's job easier.

How is that a bad thing?

1,300,000 people die each year in car wrecks and another 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 more are injured and/or disabled.

Google's motto is "Don't be evil" after all. Is valuing short term profits over millions of lives not "evil"?

>Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.

-Larry Page

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You can't win any argument with

1) Google said don't be evil 10 years ago

2) I THINK that X is evil

3) Therefore, Google should not do X

Killing puppies is evil. Is not open sourcing sensor data they spent their money money to get evil? I don't think so.

Neglecting to save millions of lives in order to make some extra money is okay, but killing a dog is not?

Who's to say that opening up the data will save more lives than Google continuing on their current course?

If google opens the data (that I would argue is still incomplete), and irresponsible actors are given a means (via incomplete LIDAR maps, algorithms, etc) to mislead people already screaming TAKE MY MONEY, that would likely lead to a TERRIBLE image for self-driving cars if and when those race-to-the-bottom companies cause injuries and deaths.

I could foresee that those irresponsible actors could then scapegoat Google's data as the source of issues, whether or not that is true.

BUT I suppose injuries, deaths, and ensuing lawsuits are what prompts stricter licensing and oversight committees. I believe however that strict enforcement of self-driving cars will be an eventuality, no homebrew kits I'm afraid.

Killing a dog is a direct action. Yes it is wrong, at least unless there was a shortage of food.. then I guess it beats cannibalism.

Running a private experiment to gather data.. that data is private. Sharing that data is opt-in, not opt-out. Google has no obligation to release it. (If they do, cool. But not evil of them not to).

Now it is valid to say the government should run more studies on self driving cars and share that data. But I am not sure any business would exist in this country if every private R&D effort they did got open-sourced.

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