> I assume that safety will only increase as the proportion rises.
I assume that safety will drastically decrease as self-driving cars are introduced.
However, for your "door to door" point, that's not desirable anyway. Even here in Tokyo, you have to walk a lot to get between your home and work or wherever you're going. That's a big, big part of why people here are so much thinner than Americans. Having transport that takes you door-to-door without any significant walking is terrible for your health.
I live at a train stop in SF. I take a bus to work. Public transit is great. I still use Waymo sometimes because coverage isn’t always amazing at all times. Sometimes I’m in a rush, sometimes I want some privacy, sometimes I’m carrying some heavy things.
Replacing low-occupancy human driven vehicles with low-occupancy robot driven vehicles is good if they’re safer. Today, they’ve proven to be safer. Today, lives are saved because a human driver chose not to drive. If a private individual wants to pay more (<2x, not a single order of magnitude), then let them. There is no reason that the private introduction of self driving cars needs to stop the investment in public transit.
Let us save lives on the road to the future, even if some stops along the way aren’t your chosen stops.
They systematically get in less accidents, the accidents they do get in are not their fault, and they tend to be less dangerous when they occur. As I understand it, that unambiguously means outperforming.
We don’t need to remove every manual car in the world overnight, but this seems like a clear win, at least in the regions they operate. They don’t need to cure cancer and drive in every road condition at all times in all places and also not ever make any mistakes at all to be an improvement. “L5” is just a label, which I guess doesn’t apply, while “safer”, “less accident prone” are different labels, which do apply.
As a fellow driver, I don't care that they can't drive out of that area, I care if tf they're a safer driver.
As such, L5 seems to me like the wrong bar.
And, of course, if you otherwise basically never drive, you're probably a hazard in those marginal conditions.
What is so magical about L5 criteria? Today Waymo is performing drives on public roads, and it’s safer than a human. Today. With whatever Lx criteria it meets. The label is irrelevant, all that matters is the mile-per-mile record of being safer.
Not sure what “Waymos own admission” means, but they out perform not underperform.
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...
Parent's point is that in the context where they do work, they save lives. You're arguing about something else entirely - whether they work in all situations. But that's irrelevant.
I haven't seen that data. Do these cars drive in rainy, wet, snowy weather or in cities with crazy streets such as the northeastern United States? Not that I know of. I think it's a wild leap to suggest they're safer already today.
Nor does autonomy have to be limited to car-sized vehicles. It could be used for larger vehicles, perhaps intermediate between car and bus size — once you don't have to pay for a driver, operating a larger number of smaller vehicles is much more viable. These could be dynamically dispatched and routed, eliminating many drawbacks of existing bus service.
i wonder how much of a different technical problem that is from what they do today...
Surveillance state would love that! Hundreds of thousands of cars with 360 degree cameras and sensors capturing everything inside and outside the vehicle. Forget installing CC cameras. just claim “nAtIoNaL sEcUrItY”, get a rubber stamped warrant from FISA court, and go to town.
A problem created by cars (pedestrian vs car, MVA accidents) may be solved by self driving cars. But we introduced a perfect system to allow a foreign or domestic state to perform over reaching surveillance. Ripe for abuse as well.
All of this nonsense could have been avoided if cities were just built with alternative transportation methods in mind. But nope, we have to use cars for every stupid little activity.
Wasteful. Polluting.
1. If you judge new technology by the absolute worst way that it can be used, you are going to spend your life worrying about a million things that will never happen. Focus on stuff that's happening instead of hypotheticals.
2. In a really dystopian setup, you can be restricted from leaving "your zone" regardless of autonomous vehicles. There's plenty of existing technology that can help with that. (number plates, cellular networks, facial recognition, etc.)
How do you prevent "hypotheticals" from becoming "stuff that's happening" if you never pay any attention to them in the first place and let them happen?
Once it's starts happening, speak; if speaking doesn't work, fight; if fighting doesn't work, move. This works.
Like cameras and AI used to enforce the “not allowed to sing while driving” policy for Amazon drivers?
The only way to make sure things never happen is by worrying about the worst possible misuse of the technology. Because someone will misuse it that way if it gets him money or power.
I'm not saying to be naive to possibilities, especially as they begin to move from the "possibilities" bucket to the "realities" bucket, but isn't it better to focus on making progress against stuff that's already happening? If Amazon are preventing drivers from singing, I think those drivers might be able to change that.
As a computer, i find your trust in technology amusing. /s