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Waymo tested for years in sparsely populated desert suburbs before expanding to SF.

The main criticism has always been that they were developing at a glacial pace.

What alternative path to deployment would you propose?

Development at a glacial pace. Their product timeline and finances are not my concern, and it’s not everybody else’s responsibility to mitigate the risks of their product development. Lots of things in industry would develop much more quickly if we decided to set the product safety bar low enough— I’m glad we at least recognize when we screwed up by taking away the operating licenses of companies like this. What happened here was exactly what I envisioned happening when the slick, CYA-first, blame-everyone-else, ethics-are-negotiable attitude endemic to the software (and other) industries entered this safety-critical field. The Therac-25 fried multiple people before the industry acknowledged enough culpability to trash a design that would never have been released if they had used proper design and engineering discipline in the first place. It was just a whole lot cheaper to let a developer check his own work and blame everyone else.

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