Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

Highly doubt it.

1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho.

Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :)

2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :)

It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop).

If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.

Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower

AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves.

On the bright side, parking may become cheaper.

Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.

The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles.

However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.

Clearly, the rollout of human drivers isn't working and we should start blocking roads until the government bans them.

I have my issues with this "live testing" that Cruise et al. are doing, but let's not pretend that these sorts of things are any worse than what human drivers have done, and continue to do.

The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.

“When intentionally broken, this transport doesn’t work. So it is not scalable.”

There are many ways to scale car-centric transportation that have been done successfully in countries other than the US. Public transit is one example.

Autonomous buses could solve a lot of the car issues in the US. Not if we keep putting cones in front of them though.

I don't particularly love US car culture, but this is an absurd take. A single broken-down train will block all trains behind it on the same track. Unexpected damage to a runway can choke an airport.

So are we to believe that the only "scalable" form of transportation is bicycles, because it's easy and fast to move a broken or crashed bicycle out of the right of way? Yeah, right.

This is an interesting to me. From the perspective of an internet builder, systems vulnerable to shutdown from individual bad actors are obviously insecure and "not scalable". But too much time in this environment can make us forget that the actual world is about a zillion times less hostile than the internet.

As an educator, I worked with a computer security savvy 13 year old who knew my software background and would occasionally disclose vulnerabilities in the district's systems to me. He was incredulous that the network could be so insecure.

I asked about the security systems governing walking around in the hallway - was there any physical impediment preventing one person from punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another? Of course not - the security is socially constructed. Norms, consequences, etc, that on balance seemed to work out pretty effectively. I tried to make a case that security inside a local network of the size and scope of our school board was also ~90% social construction, but the student really struggled with it. There was a strong belief that because it was computers, you were expected to exploit it if it were vulnerable.

First paragraph is about the IT security mindset bleeding into real life, third is about the IT adversarial mindset corrupting our disposition toward technical equipment generally.

Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism? Will xyst's (and my student's) assessments of these systems become true? Have they already and I'm just a knob?

Every form of mass transit suffers from single outsized impacts of failures.

When the Korean airline airplane crashed into the end of the SFO runway it disrupted 10s of thousands flying into the Bay Area.

now imagine it happens at 70 mph on i5 because a tumble weed blows by, of which I’ve seen plenty, and it takes the company 3 hours for the driver to get out there. Or similar for the usual construction temp lane closer.

There’s a reason they don’t test on I-5 with their current tech.

So a gas turbine most likely won't even notice a cone.

Besides in a modern high-bypass turbofan about 80% of it would just get shredded by the fan and fly around the delicate parts, which aren't that much delicate.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

But idiots just need something to be against.

Well, it sounds strangely like a "15-minute city" agenda, where you have less pollution, less noise, less traffic, and are stuck living in your block :D

The fact that this prank can be done quickly, cheaply, safely, and without property damage means the car software needs to be prepared to deal with it without becoming a public nuisance. If the software is not prepared, the car is not fit for widespread deployment on public roads.

The equal possibility, which you raise, of dangerous impediments on both manned and unmanned vehicles is not relevant here, because the argument has not been made that the cars inadequately deal with dangerous impediments.

Finally, our society is largely comfortable with the current level of risk that manned vehicles entail, together with the ongoing progress of safety improvements. Not many would agree that the concept is a big mistake.

That's the process of "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow. And it's blatantly obvious by your comment that we're in stage 1, "good to their users".... except people LOVE free shit. But no techbro gives shit away for free. This is 'buy-in' and training data.

It ONLY gets worse from here.

And 100 cars on the road is still 100 cars on the road, even if only carrying 100 people. It's a waste of energy, waste of resources, and climate-destroying by fact of all that asphalt and resources to make said cars... all so you don't have to ride in icky 'public transit', cause that's what the "poors" take.

You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right? In fact, the protests are in response to a decision which allowed the companies to start charging for driver-less rides, so that is already changing.

Hard to say which way people will go overall. I personally am no longer a fan of driver-less cars. I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence. I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience and a lot of other negative consequences if cities adapt their infrastructure to cater to those vehicles. History repeating itself for "automobile progress." A possible second coming of demolishing our cities and neighborhoods to make way for cars. Yeah I know most if not all of the arguments for how the technology will just fix all the problems and make everything about cars better, I used to make those arguments myself. I don't believe them anymore.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

Uhh, about that...

> Tesla allows self-driving cars to break speed limit, again

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-all...

The time to find out your car does not stop for emergency vehicles, is not during an emergency. Yet here we are

However it is very likely that self driving is in some sense AGI complete - in other words to get to the goal may require something just as generally intelligent as humans, not least as driving in a city is a social interaction problem as much as a routing problem.

That'll happen only when we have solved the general intelligence problem. Driving on roads is a cooperative process, it requires a theory of mind, and many people are sick of making allowances for experimental technology that is inherently incapable of performing as intended. It's the equivalence of goldmaking alchemists.

Meanwhile there's us motorcyclists - I trust robotaxis to even estimate distances as much as I trust drunk drivers or teenagers on their second driving lessons.

Banish that shit to test tracks.

Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive feat—that sometimes crashes into firetrucks.

Until they stop crashing into firetrucks, which are rather large, bright red, and pretty hard to crash into, the idea that they are going to be better than most drivers is speculation.

http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2016/11/o-caos-imposto-pela-o...

I think it will politely park and let you be robbed, kidnapped, or worse.

You can’t stop/rob a robocar if they don’t exist. Of course you can already rob something else.

yes

>>I think there is a clear and obvious justification for why we don't let anyone drive anything on the roads: safety.

Safety, the drum beat of the authoritarians for all of human history. Safety is often used to limit freedom, rarely is safety the actual reason for laws and regulations, even rarer does safety increase as a result of the rules

In this case there is no safety issue even being claimed, people are annoyed by them, they believe they take away from other public transit aka they are politically opposed to them, or a wide range of other non-safety issues.

If there is a safety issue that actually endangers others we have many mechanisms to check that including legal liability.

Further with safety you get in the "if it saves one life" debate as well. In short if safety was the only goal we would have no freedom at all, life is about risk management, not ensuring absolute safety. I have no desire to live in a "safe" society where safety first is the goal

To misquote Mike Rowe.. "Safety Third... lots of things come before safety"

Keep in mind public roads, in the US, pre-date Automobiles, pre-date even the founding of this nation. and I think the idea that free travel upon public roads was not a core freedom would be a shock to the Founders