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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

There was no emergency! The car wasn't "spinning", it was just driving around a parking lot and failing to find a location to stop. This was a navigation failure, not a control failure. And the solution is to call the human operators who can control it remotely. Which is what happened, and they did. Pulling an "emergency stop" level would have made things worse and not better.

Is it embarassing for Waymo? Sure. But the BBC basically lied to you here, and you bought it. The circumstance you're imagining is not what happened. Just watch the video.

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I wasn't imagining a car spinning out of control. Being trapped inside a car indefinitely is dangerous: you could get carsick and have to throw up, urgently need to use a restroom, have a painful leg cramp that causes a lasting muscle injury, miss picking up your child from school, miss your appointment with your probation officer, be unable to obtain essential medication, suffer from heatstroke, or die of dehydration. An adult should never need to "call human operators" and ask their permission to get out of a car. Unless they're being arrested or something.

And if you hear that the car has run over a child that the operator didn't notice and is dragging it down the pavement under the car, it's essential for you to be able to hit the E-stop button rather than calling an operator to eventually stop the car.

> Being trapped inside a car indefinitely is dangerous

It was like two minutes, tops. Again, it's on video!

And I love that you started from a position of needing an emergency escape button and when challenged it's... because the occupant might have to pee really bad.

By lying about my comment, you are really starting to exhaust the presumption of good faith.

You literally argue in this thread that "These cars need an emergency stop button" because the occupants might "urgently need to use a restroom". I cherry picked that because it's hilarious, but it's not a lie and you know it. Those quotes are real: those are your words.

Accusing other people of lying when they point out your whoppers is... not good faith argument.

Your comment asserted that that was the only justification I gave. Even if that were true, it would still make you the kind of asshole who makes fun of elderly women with incontinence problems—in fact, who advocates omitting basic safety features from engineering designs because you think it's hilarious when elderly women with incontinence problems wet their pants. Or, interpreting your comment with more charity than the annual UNICEF budget, you think it would be hilarious if elderly women with incontinence problems had to pull down their pants and pee on the passenger seat.

But it's not true, which makes you a liar as well.

Comments like that one undermine my faith in the capacity of humanity for goodness. You managed to combine dishonesty, unprovoked rhetorical aggression, engineering irresponsibility, and fantasies of a breathtaking degree of sadism into a few short lines. It's honestly one of the most contemptible comments I've ever seen on HN.

> Your comment asserted that that was the only justification I gave.

It certainly did not. It's right up above, please re-read.

Just stop. You got yourself into an embarrassing situation with an untenable argument and are behaving badly, calling your fellow posters liars and assholes.

> the solution is to call the human operators who can control it remotely

Sounds like a recipe for failure, to be honest. In a potentially life or death situation, the last thing I want is to rely on a remote human being. Plus, if the device entered an erroneous state, I certainly don't trust it to correctly interpret a remote "emergency stop" signal.

If the machine goes crazy (and there is no world where driving around a parking lot until the end of time is the rational expected behavior), the only safe option is a big, red, cut-circuit emergency stop button.

I agree. Unfortunately just cutting circuits isn't enough; you also need to brake and possibly unlock the doors.

> In a potentially life or death situation

Which, once more, was not happening here. The car was lost, not out of control. And the built-in solution was applied, and worked.

What do you really want here? You've never been in a Uber that took a wrong turn? Never argued with a cab driver about a route? Never been stuck in an airliner at the end of a runway waiting for clearance? Vehicles do things their occupants don't like all the time, and no one freaks out on the internet about it.

If a cab driver or Uber driver locks you into their car and doesn't allow you to get out, that's "false imprisonment", a felony in most jurisdictions, carrying a sentence of several years of prison. It is very unusual for them to even lock the doors such that you need their help to open them. The last time I had to open an Uber door in a moving car to force the driver to stop—because he'd lied about having air conditioning to get the fare—was two weeks ago.

Airliners are legally required to have emergency exit doors that can be activated by anyone inside the airliner as long as the cabin isn't pressurized. You also know, before you board the airliner, that you won't be able to get off it for several hours. So, if you have an appointment with your probation officer in half an hour or need to pick up your kids from school in half an hour, you won't board in the first place.

You're apparently arguing that passengers of self-driving cars should not have the same legal and mechanical protections that the passengers of these other types of vehicles have.

I'm not saying it was happening here, I'm just taking this anecdote as food for thought. I'm appalled to learn that those vehicles don't have an emergency stop system. A real emergency stop. Not some remote-controlled or AI-assisted stuff. A low-tech, last-chance emergency stop, like the one you have in trains or on any industrial machine.

> You've never been in a Uber that took a wrong turn? Never argued with a cab driver about a route?

If a cab driver keeps cricling on a parking lot, again and again and again, never finding the obvious exit, I'll get a bit concerned and eventually tell him "OK, never mind, I'll find another way, just drop me there". If he refuses to let me off, and locks the doors, and keeps circling, I'll be extremely anxious. This is horror movie material.

> I'll get a bit concerned and eventually tell him "OK, never mind, I'll find another way, just drop me there".

Isn't that exactly what happened here? Rider pushed the help button, got help, and was dropped off. Right there.

I think you get to the truth of the matter with your "horror movie material" quip. You don't think this situation was dangerous. You think it was scary because of the robot. Well, OK. But that's not a safety argument.

i am not sure i would say it was "just driving around a parking lot" it was not spinning but it _was_ just going in circles, watch the steering wheel and the background.. right turn pause right turn pause etc you see the same buildings etc. my spouse would have probably barfed all over that back seat

So if there is no connectivity?

Presumably it pulls over and stops if the backend connection drops, no? This is a kind of goalpost motion: you're countering an argument about an incorrectly-identified failure mode by positing that the condition would still obtain if there was a dual mode failure instead (i.e. that the car would get stuck in a navigation loop and have a bug in its recovery from connectivity issues).

That's bad engineering, because you can always get to some kind of catastrophe if you keep piling on layers. Might as well just skip to "What if the motor circuit fails open and it accelerates forever?!" in that case.

An E-stop button would also solve the problem of the motor circuit failing closed, causing the kind of uncontrolled acceleration you're talking about.

Uh, that was sarcasm. Unintended acceleration failures are huge deals in the industry and absolutely already designed in with multiple (probably dozens) of layers of safety/redundancy at all levels up to and including human control. The point was that you can still imagine a N-mode failure that defeats all of that and use it to justifify whatever whizgig you're demanding in your local internet discussion. And that this was ridiculous, because that's not how you do engineering.

And... you did.

Yes, you can always imagine failures that disable your failsafes. But you seem to be using that as an excuse for advocating omitting even basic failsafes. That's also not how you do engineering.

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