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Comment by mathw | Hacker News Reader

They're trained to look ahead, anticipate and adapt to the road conditions, judging when they need the siren and when they don't. This is important in built-up areas, because there's no gain in waking up people at 2am when you didn't actually need a siren to proceed safely.

When they're putting it on at a junction and you're already in it, they're not expecting you to magically disappear out of their way. They're expecting you to look at where they're going and stay out of their path. This might involve proceeding as you were going to in order to clear it for them. What they really want is to stop anybody else from entering it until they've got through.

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The argument for self-driving cars is that they will be better than a human driver. A human driver would backup, sound the horn, or both. If a self-driving car doesn't attempt these things, something is deficient.

A human driver can shout and gesticulate which will enjoin passers-by to engage with the situation - waving and shouting too. I've seen several slow speed (eg parking) accidents avoided this way. Perhaps these vehicles need a "I'm in danger" external indicator of some sort too?

You mean like the hazard (sic!) lights and the horn? Out where I live, having those functional are amongst the hard requirements for street-legal vehicles.

No it's a separate, more primal, layer of hazard indication that seems to shortcut the Bystander Effect and enlist aid. It can be initiated by non-drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists too.

Alternatively - these are just growing pains until the human driving the truck is replaced by an algorithm.

So basically, self driving cars will be worse than human-driven cars until ALL cars are self driving cars? This is the first fully autonomous version of "No True Scotsman" that I've seen!

I don't think it is an instance of "No True Scotsman" to say that there are situations that self-driving cars may never be as good as humans at, but that those situations only occur because of the unpredictability of human drivers.

Self-driving cars don't have to be better than humans at everything in order to be objectively better drivers than humans. In 2010, 32,999 people died in car crashes in the US [0]. If self-driving cars are on-balance 1% better than human beings at driving, then 329 lives are saved.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

This is the reason I believe that self driving thing is doomed. Significant amount of humans will refuse to stop driving. Fair amount of them will make life of self driving things unbearable. Sizable part - on porpoise. Just to check how good a computer is.

Seriously speaking from perspective of a truck driver.

The reasons truck driver backed into thing are: He couldn’t see it. It wasn’t there when he started.

Horn and flash of lights would stop a human driver. When I back up a truck I use all my senses, since I can’t see much. Easiest fix for the robot thingy - add horn and lights. (And wait until all residents start complaining)

People do die of old age, y'know. And long before that, they stop driving because their eyes become too bad and their reactions become too slow.

All you have to do to cement a driverless-car hegemony is to stop issuing new driver's licenses. 50 years later: no more drivers.

I read a sentiment that I found myself nodding to: people will stop driving when it’s convenient for them.

Some people love driving, and some people love riding horses, but you don’t see many horses on city streets today.

The argument for self-driving cars is that they will be no worse than a human driver.

Here, UK, they don't put it on at all during the day, travelling through built up areas, particularly Ambulances it seems.

When the sirens are used it's great because you can tell what road they're coming along (after a while, it was much better with the "squelch" sirens) and anticipate in good time.

Agreed, waking everyone at 2am is not needed generally, but howabout alerting people at 3pm.

You appear to have inside knowledge here, presumably there's been some change in policy on this in the last - I don't know - 5 years, where it's been chosen during normal daytime callouts not to use sirens if at all possible?

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