Robotaxi haters in San Francisco are disabling the AVs with traffic cones
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Good luck automating society if the public sentiment starts to really turn against these kinds of initiatives. Us nerds can argue about the merits of markets all day long, but we can’t expect the society we’re leaving behind to willingly participate in this new techno world order.
Automation is so brittle. It’s hard enough to design a fault-tolerant web, I can’t even imagine how we’re gonna do it in the physical world at scale with things like self-driving cars when they’re so easy to disable.
It’s like infosec, the attack surface of the system is far too big to properly guard against unless you’re willing to spend considerably and make the necessary sacrifices.
> in the physical world at scale with things like self-driving cars when they’re so easy to disable.
Cars are easy to disable in general. You can permanently disable lots of cars on a random street before you get caught. This is temporary and harmless, so people aren't really serious about it.
Open Google Maps and try to streetview over Germany. People (or provacy laws) did not adjust, and I can’t say I’m sad about that - even though not having SV can be annoying.
Actually, the people did adjust.
What I meant by people adjusting is that self-driving car will stop being something people have some kneejerk hostile reaction to.
Of course people change over time to live with a technology, but I would not take it for granted that it _has_ to happen always, and not without reshaping the tech to make it more palatable to people’s concerns and values.
I agree with you regarding the brittleness, the small things that count.
This is the typical automation cycle. Automation is a pipeline and you keep adding/removing tasks in it.
The cone placement discovery reminds me of the feared birds, that can literally bring down an airplane when sucked into the turbine. Large steel construct vs small bird - bird wins. Large steel construct vs plastic thing - plastic wins. ;)
Small scale automation is brittle. Large scale automation is far easier, especially if you're willing to purpose build infrastructure for it. This would be light rail, trains, and busses.
Also like infosec... if these cars "behaved better" then these faults would remain obscure and possibly unpatched for longer periods of time. It should make everyone wonder what other fault modes these vehicles have.
> especially if you're willing to purpose build infrastructure for it.
These companies are gonna have a hard time pulling that off politically. Public transit serves everyone (which this technology also kills), why should governments support infra built for private companies like this? The technology is not public by design. It would be political suicide.
corruption?
Right now it has more of a technobro and rich people vibe, hoping it doesn't fall into the same kind of rabbit hole as the Google Glass and other useful innovations that just had horrendous PR and the worst people to evangelise it.
Public sentiment can be easily manipulated with sufficient resources.
While not fully automated, one or two people could monitor a fleet of hundreds of cars for problems with the vehicles and send one or two human agents in the field to investigate and fix.
Still stands to be wildly more efficient than a normal car ownership.
E.g. how much of an burden is a service allowed to be on society at large? Most of the "disruption"-based startup models are based around exploiting some rule that societies had before that. If you have to trick society into using your service, consider you just might be on the wrong side of history.
Without knowing the details, when a nerd friend talks to me about a fictional self driving taxi start up, the first thing they would need to convince me of is that such a thing is even benefitial given the fact that it is space that is limited on city streets. Then I would have worries a out how that corp is socializing part of it's costs (by using public roads, by usings ways of attracting particular workers etc).
Don't get me wrong, those might all be ways to make good money, I don't dispute that. But as someone living in a city my stakes are different. I want to be able to get from A to B without being stuck in traffic with 100 empty cars, where the workers receive low pay and the road wear costs are paid by my taxes.
Sure, it is harder to find a way to earn money from which all people profit, but it is not impossible. If your corp is acting like a leech on society, don't be surprised if it is treated as such.
Playing video games I use to joke about people getting angry about cheats, I argued the game must be really important to them if they get so emotional.
A thing I keep thinking: A culture isn't weird until compared or confronted with a different one.
You got the impression that people don't like nerds building ridiculous things but nothing could be further from the truth.
Normals absolutely love these things, they define their being more than anything. They love to see nerds fool around AND FAIL. It's the same with investors (who are grouped along with get rich quick schemes) they love to see investors lose everything. Bitcoin is twice as exciting! Cant wait to see the pyramid implode.
I see a picture one time of a street in China and mistakenly thought it was my city in the Netherlands. It was just the context that gave it away. All the houses in those streets are different they have tiles with round holes in the side walk, the same trees and even people cycling wearing the usual... the usual cloths everyone else around the world is wearing.
This is why people take vacations far away, if you don't go far enough everything looks exactly the same, an endless regurgitation of the same mindless replication.
The answer is to do public transport with rollercoasters or turn all streets into half pipes, replace the main road with 2 looooong wave pools, use the AI to make self driving pony carts, busses with 10 floors.
I know, I know, people didn't want running water or a sewage system. Sadly for them it didn't fail but there are plenty of failures for them to laugh at, get them though their day at their useless job.
Space is a concern in cities. It is one of the concerns. If you have the same roads-to-building-ratio public transport will always beat individual transport, because that is just basic geometry.
You like to frame this as progress, but being able to transport less people while using more resources and space isn't progress.
I don't know how much the "we don't consent to being on camera" argument holds water, since there's already lots of private cameras monitoring public urban places and roads. Maybe the fact that the cameras are up close and in your face is valid, though.
I don't condone mischief, but I also understand being annoyed. IMO, all vehicles on public roads should have a driver for now. But I welcome our autonomous-driving future.
1. This autonomous robot is not doing anything for me, and is helping someone else realize their capitalistic aspirations.
2. By vandalizing the robot, a victimless crime, I can do my part to just slightly close the gap between I, one who has gotten the short end of the economic stick, and some corporation/ceo who is on the other end of the economic spectrum, profiteering.
Thus slightly narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots, which for most individuals isn’t realizable in any other way
Of course, you can’t be expected to have privacy in places like public parks according to CA law, so I’m not sure where the law stands on that.
> Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules
EDIT: I’ll be more direct. It’s a hoax. A fiction. An attempt to portray widespread safety concerns among the populace that do not exist.
There’s a hearing coming up at the board the state of California appointed regarding expansion of the robotaxis.
Alongside that vote, the city’s quality of operation has noticeably deteriorated. Encampments are more common, drug intoxication to the point of collapse and physical decay is highly visible. Robberies have become commonplace.
These effects are now beyond the point where they be explained by pointing at flat trend data, or as a temporary effect of more severe pandemic measures.
A number of local politicians have been facing significant heat over this dysfunction
National and international media publications have begun to distrust local publications for papering over issues and have amplified that pressure.
At that point, those SF politicians began a sudden unified push attacking self-driving cars. Self-driving cars have recently become more reliable than manually driven taxis in SF in terms of accidents per miles driven.
The attacks escalated to the point that false data was submitted against robotaxis to the California board, mischaracterizing accidents where another driver impacted the self-driven car while stopped. That falsehood was later discovered.
When those same people began promoting this “night of the cone” meme, the origin was obvious to even the most casual observer.
Robotaxis have been up and operating for some time. The city is in trouble and it needs the revenue innovation brings.
We need to stop playing games.
Good luck with all that.
In London as in many other cities, on a Friday night, large parts of town basically turn into a giant open air pub. No one would drive there voluntarily but there’s the occasional Uber / Taxi / Delivery / Maintenance driver passing through at a crawl. People will get out of the way but it’ll sometimes require creativity to get through.
It would take a real asshole to deliberately cause trouble for some low paid driver and fortunately there are few of those in the general population. People can empathise, “guy’s just doing a job, no need to be a dick, hang on I’ll move my pint…”
However, given the amount of crap people have to put up with with the likes of ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ from the supposedly smart and better machines then I feel like the ‘asshole to a machine’ threshold is much much lower.
Ummm… that’s clearly the point. What’s the controversial bit? Stable owners decried that house and buggy drivers were being competed by cars and driving them out of business. I’d much rather have safer streets because taxis are ever vigilant rather than be in an Uber with a driver boasting about how he figured out how to drive 18 hours a day and gets almost no sleep.
>>It’s near impossible to simultaneously compete on cost and have safety
....airlines exist and compete on cost with extremely stringent safety requirements?
Also, no one is making money off self driving tech any time soon, people have been working on it for more than a decade and it costs billions. It might be another decade before it is profitable.
The real problems are:
- vehicles owned and operated by a single driver. These take up precious space for parking instead of living
- auto accidents due to human error. Tired, drunk, texting or just aggressive drivers cause auto accidents.
The slow streets movement is great. Put up cones where all cars can’t use certain streets.
Self driving cars and the companies behind them haven’t earned all our trust yet, but the sooner society shares robo taxis as a replacement for single owner vehicles the better.
The more autonomous cars fail to do any harm whatsoever, the less of a case against them people will have. Most of the current fears are fueled by minor incidents, weird little bugs that these systems still have, and lots of irrational outrage and fears. And of course there are lots of armchair "experts" providing all sorts of reasons why the autonomous cars should not and cannot possibly work, even while they can easily be observed to be working just fine. That disconnect only stretches so far before it breaks.
Raw economics will do the rest. Insurers will penalize manual driving and scrutinize things like liability when accidents happen. The raw math insurers use is already against manual driving and they already like cars with lots of safety features. Cities will want to reclaim the space occupied by useless parking spaces (i.e. expect to pay for those). And drivers licenses will become much more expensive as those are no longer required to get from A to B and will come with a lot more scrutiny.
At this point I'm very skeptical of issues that get attention. There definitely have been legitimate problems, but it seems like they're rare enough that people would tolerate them, thus fake incidents need to be created. This cone thing also might backfire because now even when there's a real incapacitated AV people will speculate it was due to external mischief.
“That one time the self driving car blocked a fire truck”, sure, but statistically on a per-rider basis are we seeing more or less harm/mischief than with human drivers or taxis? I haven’t seen any credible analysis of this question.
Similarly “they killed one person”, ok, how many human drivers killed pedestrians last year? You’ll find it’s more than self-driving cars, but again we need the per-rider (really, per passenger-mile driven) statistics.
A general pattern - even if self-driving cars were 10x safer, there would still be pushback if they are sub-human in any single niche case. We will cause many (thousands) people to die by being irrational like this.
Not to dismiss the concerns - they just need to be quantified and taken in context.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gen-z-wont-let-tiktok-stop-the...
I'm confused, because I thought that the scanners which detect TOS violations were becoming smarter, and it doesn't seem like an isolated swear word--or mention of sexual assault using plain English--would trigger an actual TOS violation, but it seems that these creators are wary of attracting attention by using the words uncensored.
I think this is one of the most interesting point the protestors make.
This kind of solution doesn't seem to integrate very well with new practice of urbanisms where pedestrian, bike and traffic intermingled in the same space and travel distance are shorter.
But I am European so I am probably bias because our city are already partially car free.
Two hundred years and they haven't won once.