San Francisco is getting cold feet about self-driving car tests

I'll bite. Fines and fees are a difficult topic. Fines and fees should never be used to fund the government. They are a perverse incentive. We have seen over the years how horrible politicians try to "lower taxes" by shifting the cost of running a town to people who can't fight back.

For traffic management, I like the idea of roundabouts and twists to control speed better. Red lights and stop signs have inherent deficiencies and we should phase them out. I'd argue that drivers should feel they are going to fast and need to slow down by cues like narrow streets with no onstreet parking, not four lane stroads with 30mph plastered on a five mile perfectly straight stretch.

Most importantly though, we need better public transit or any public transit. Ideally free of cost for the riders and paid for by taxes.

Strange. Traffic tickets are one of the best ways to diverge money from the elite to the poor. How can any self proclaimed leftist be against it? There are tons of rich douchebags in California with supercars.

I once had to defend myself against an automated red light ticket from a car I did not own, with a driver of a different ethnicity and race than me on a day when I could prove I was not in the country. I've never lived in SF.

From what I can tell, that wing of the SF court house is administered by crooks.

My experiences with SFPD have been mostly fine, but I'd pop open some bubbly if I heard the court house was razed by a frustrated real estate developer.

A red light ticket is $500. At that price point, the value prop is really poor. It does not improve safety or improve compliance proportional to the ticket price. It just makes everyone mad.

That may be so, but SF in particular did decriminalize A LOT of things. Most notable is theft under $950, for example, where is not hard to find videos and news items, e.g: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

If a person stops in the middle of a road, other people talk to that person, and typically learn what's going on and can help work on resolving it. Are they having a heart attack? Do they need people to push the car? Are they having a road rage incident? Are they a jerk who needs to run into a store and picked the wrong place to stop temporarily to do it? Even if the situation can't be solved, the ability to communicate (or the implication of not being able to communicate) gives predictable, human-friendly feedback which can be shared with emergency services and other people.

The self-driving car could save many more lives by simply not moving at all from its parking spot, except in cases of medical emergency or imminent threat to life mitigated only by moving.

The economy might be improved somewhat by personal vehicular mobility, but we’re talking about human lives.

Humans are generally viewed to have an inherent right -- or at least a strong imperative -- to fully participate in society. Restricting a human's right or privilege to do something typically carries a higher burden than simply asking whether the thing they are doing is a net positive/negative. Over the last 100 years the layout of cities and countries reflects an expectation that full participation in society requires access to transportation. While driving is not an absolute right and we subject drivers to certain minimum requirements (licensing and sometimes periodic relicensing, insurance, various laws that apply to conduct in a motor vehicle), the presumption is basically to create a pathway that allows people to drive.

Driving creates a danger and a number of costly externalities. Those are the costs side of the cost-benefit equation. It may be the case that AI drivers have generally lower costs because of your assertion that they make fewer mistakes or less grave mistakes than humans. This does not lead to the obvious inference that allowing an AI driver today in a particular place under a particular regime of rules confers a benefit equal to allowing a human to drive.

In the same way, for instance, we do not generally pass laws or policies against people having children, even if we recognize that some people are suboptimal or unfit parents. Instead we presume fitness and build in some checks to capture excessively unfit parenting later. Whatever the cost of suboptimal parenting, we recognize the choice or ability to have a child to be a part of basic human dignity, and so the benefits outweigh the costs. Many jurisdictions place more onerous requirements on pet ownership than human ownership even if the downside cost of being a negligent pet owner is less bad than being a negligent parent.

Perhaps the calculus will be different when AI driving is costless and ubiquitous; we might decide collectively that humans have no inherent right to manually operate vehicles and full participation in society does not require them to. But in the mean time, holding AI driver street tests to a higher standard than human drivers can be justified strictly on a cost-benefit (and thus pragmatic) basis.

You might counter that, well, AI driving tests don't provide a benefit now, but given a particular utility function, the testing offers <x> marginal training value towards a future reduction in costs (in terms of injury/delay/death). But then it depends on your discount factor of the present versus the future, which is a socially determined function.

There's also an underlying presumption that there's some elasticity of resource allocation. Perhaps allocating $x million towards AI driving reduces deaths or injuries or delays; but people can readily contest that $x million spent on other options could do so more efficiently (perhaps infrastructural investment in public transit, perhaps additional free driver's training, perhaps more robust emergency services, perhaps safety features). Because much of this investment is occurring in the private sector, people rely on the state's regulation of these efforts to incentivize allocating resources towards preferred investments. This is also pragmatic, rather than puritanical.

It's fine to disagree or have a more bullish view of AI driving, or to feel these concerns are overrated, but it makes very little sense to characterize them as puritanical (in contrast to pragmatic). Some people may have puritanical views, just as some proponents of the technology may have messianic views. But both positions can be justified entirely from rational argument depending on one's utility function. Why strawman?

You are a really uncharitable poster here. Your first intervention is to dismiss anyone who disagree with you about which metrics are most useful as "bullshit" and "emotional" and here you call them puritans. I think you should engage in some self-reflection and try to approach conversation online in a less antisocial way.

Personally, I am not a big fun of utilitarianism. Reducing deaths is fine obviously, but switching modes of death with the excuse that it reduces fatalities overall is in my opinion morally questionable.