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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

It sounds more like a path prediction problem than one of not seeing them at all. I'm guessing they expected it to still handle them as well as a human driver would, even if it relied on the adult pedestrian logic.

I have doubts as to this being the right choice, but it seems less unreasonable than what I thought from the title.

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They were not able to recognize them as kids rather than generic humans. Kids behave differently and more erratically.

The details are not that imporant. The main point is that they were aware they were couldn't match human performance on kid safety yet still put their cars on the street. all while talking about the terrible toll of car crashes on children.

> Two months ago, Kyle Vogt, the chief executive of Cruise, choked up as he recounted how a driver had killed a 4-year-old girl in a stroller at a San Francisco intersection. “It barely made the news,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “Sorry. I get emotional.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general...

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It's much more likely that he believes he's doing the right thing. It seems they did make adjustments to avoid kid related accidents from this thread, so it does check out as a "temporarily displaced savior" rather than just a bland, run of the mill faker or self-deluded psycho.

Reality is nuanced.

"Our cars could see the kids; they just chose to run into them anyways" is still pretty unreasonable. Relying on tests for one scenario and assuming it works for another is a pretty good way to...well, make cars that hit people, I guess.

I wonder if we will see some jail time for at least reckless endangerment.

For all the hopes that people wouldn't need to drive in a few years and that kids wouldn't need to get driver's licenses, seems pretty unlikely at this point unless you never leave a city with good public transit.

This will sound patronizing, but I ask this earnestly - how many ML pushers in this space actually drive?

I say this because in my personal tech circle, the guys I know most convinced autonomous cars are around the corner are literally the guys who do not drive. One is an unlicensed and within a decade of retirement, convinced he'll be able to use self driving cars by (early) retirement so he doesn't have to learn.

There are a ton (or at least some) people who live in cities post their undergrad who are comfortable with continuing some combination of living with their city-centric life and leaning on friends/partners a bit and using Uber.

I literally could not have taken my first engineering job had I not had a car and been able to drive--and, indeed, would not have been able to go on many interviews. Had to go to remote job sites and, in any case, would have been that weird guy if I couldn't just rent a car and drive.

I could live in a city today and mostly remote work but I'd be very restricted in who I could reasonably visit and the activities I could partake in both locally and on vacation.

On the coasts its a weird reverse class signifier in a way. Only someone of enough means to live in a HCOL city and afford to pay for Ubers could survive into their 40s with no ability to drive.

Knowing how to drive even in a city, because you might occasionally need to is a far more normie middle class thing.

I'm on a work trip in a HCOL city running $80/day in Ubers. If I was in a more cheapskate company they'd probably had made me rent a Hertz and drive myself for the week rather than blow $500 on Ubers. Knowing I'd never be put in that situation by an employer is another class signifier.

Of course, in the scheme of things, you're maybe spending a couple hundred dollars more on the Ubers? That's nothing for many (as you say higher class) positions. I spend around $400 round trip on a car to the airport on my home end. Parking is expensive and I've also had issues.

Some combination of prices and convenience have in my experience shifted the norms though. I'd have reflexively rented a car in past times for a routine suburban business trip by air. Today, I'll spend at least a few minutes considering whether I sort of need a car for convenience/personal activities or whether Ubers would just be prohibitively expensive.

I'd add that the inability to drive closes off a lot of options. I regularly do a lot of personal activities that wouldn't really be practical without being able to drive. It's not so much urban but rural activities.

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