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Comment by wellthisisgreat | Hacker News Reader

media should start covering all the instances of human driver’s mistakes causing crashes or traffic jams.

I have seen many human drivers sort out the situation where they both wanted to turn down the same street. If they stopped and stared at each other for this long, it would probably make the local news or at least twitter. :)

Specious and unnuanced take, which is probably why it's so common. We understand human error, and its ceiling. We have decades of observation of human driving across all real world scenarios. We still know very little about what self driving cars would do at scale when exposed to the full range of conditions.

> and its ceiling.

Very doubtful. I seriously doubt a single person on this site today knows there are ~20K accidents a day in the US let alone how many traffic jams are caused by human error.

I seriously doubt they're foolish enough to ignore the denominator and let the big number quoted out of context scare them out of something they've always felt safe with due to their lived experience.

The media is so pro-human and anti-robot. Yes many self driving vehicles may be stranding a large number of people and making an entire area impossible to traverse via the streets — but many people refuse to talk about the things these cars aren’t doing. I don’t see Cruise EVs making lewd and lascivious comments about women’s bodies or getting gym equipment all sweaty and not wiping up afterward. Yet I do not see any mainstream media coverage of this fact

> The media is so pro-human and anti-robot.

As it should be right since humans are the customer and robots should be serving them.

> I don’t see Cruise EVs making lewd and lascivious comments about women’s bodies or getting gym equipment all sweaty and not wiping up afterward.

What does this have to do with self driving vehicles?

In my opinion, anything that keeps money out of Silicon Valley investors and executives wallets while the edge cases are worked out is ok in my book. Move slow and keep everyone alive.

> What does this have to do with self driving vehicles?

Everything! The media only wants to talk about robots when things go wrong, but what about all of the theoretical accidents they’ve avoided or the fact that not a single person has caught COVID from a Cruise electric vehicle?

Well, robots aren’t humans are they? You won’t expect to catch COVID-19 from a leaf and a fish getting sweaty at a gym.

Exactly, I’m agreeing with wellthisisgreat’s salient point that every time we see (for example) driverless cars causing deadlock in a city we would best turn our attention to the flaws in humanity and the benefits that driverless cars bring us. For example, no Tesla has ever laughed at me for “putting too much corn in chili” !

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