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Comment by smugma | Hacker News Reader

Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.

And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.

Triggering some sort of extreme safety mode is considered failing now?

Anything other than "normalish" tends to be a failure in driving. I.e. stopping and throwing your hazards on when you're in the intersection isn't success just because there were even worse options to have picked. It's nice they were able to pull the fleet back and get the cars out of the roads during the problem though.

I think this was a failure. The gold standard should be that the if every human driver was replaced with an AI how well could the system function. This makes it look like things would be catastrophic. Thus, showing how humans continue to be much more versatile and capable than AI.

I suppose if you lower the standards for what you hope AI can accomplish it wouldn't be considered a failure.

If every human driver was replaced with AI, this situation would have been fine. All the self-driving cars would have respected the four way stop

But they're exclusively used in areas that allow both human and AI drivers, so this hardly seems relevant.

I'd say yes. The goal of a self-driving car is to emulate humans. If the car is panicking and reverting to "extreme safety mode" in situations where a normal human is going to be fine, then that's a failure.

>Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.

Just because no integer lives were wasted doesn't mean we can't sum the man hours and get a number greater than 1

Using that math it would be better if they were faster even if they killed somebody.

That's a repulsive argument... Just because some argument is logically sound doesn't mean it's rational or reasonable.

Also, when attempting that math, make sure you account for the buffer that everyone already builds into their life. No sense in double counting the extra 10m I'm angry in traffic, instead of angry sitting at home because I'm doom scrolling some media feed with that extra 10m I saved because the robotaxi was faster.

I mean, we would all save lives if we just never used a car outside of medical emergencies, but we do, so clearly there's some time/risk tradeoff that's happening.

Your naive feel good attitude (and you're not alone in it, that crap permeates white collar western society) is exactly the problem and being all emotional about it only worsens your ability to reason about it.

Whenever we do something "good" at societal scale be it build ADA ramps or engage in international trade of consumer goods or in this case, have transportation infrastructure, there is always some tradeoff like this. We can either do the thing in a safer to life and limb manner, but that almost always has tradeoffs that make the thing less accessible or worse performing. We could have absurdly low maximum vehicle speeds, that would save lives, but the time and wealth (which are convertible to each other on some level) renders the tradeoff not worth it (to the public at large).

You can value a whole life loss higher than man hours. You can value a child more than the elderly. You can make all sorts of adjustments like that but they do not change the fundamental math of the problem.

> Your naive feel good attitude (and you're not alone in it, that crap permeates white collar western society) is exactly the problem and being all emotional about it only worsens your ability to reason about it.

It's not a feel good attitude. I'm only objecting to your shallow take arguing that the commoditization of human life is reasonable. (i.e. touch grass) Similar to how you're concerned, exclusively, with the numbers you think you can count. That attitude of dehumanization has never resulted in good things things for society and humanity. That's the trade off I'm suggesting is important to consider when trying to make up numbers as you are. I'm not arguing that an absurdly low max speed is better. I'm arguing that it's small minded to try to count like that.

> You can value a whole life loss higher than man hours. You can value a child more than the elderly. You can make all sorts of adjustments like that but they do not change the fundamental math of the problem.

I wouldn't make any adjustments like that. The value or importance that exists with a human life, the case example, being a person that cares for others, and is cared about by others. Can't be reduced into a value that's translatable to man hours. I'd trade hours with some people for minutes with others. Just because time is something you can quantify, and you like that you can count it. Doesn't make it more better or important.

To be clear, I'm not saying your math is wrong, I'm saying you're wrong to believe it applies. (in such a simplistic manner.) You can use the math to decide how you're going to make tradeoffs given known input values; how much can my city pay for safety equipment to protect people. But you can't make up some adjacent math and say, this car's design is wrong because it didn't kill the correct number of people... err I mean, the correct number of man hours.

>to learn from and improve.

Okay, let's see if they actually do it this time.

Waymo has been quite good about responsibly learning and improving imo. I do hope and think they’ll learn from this.

Have they implemented a cat-friendly update since the incident a few months ago?

I had to look up what this was a reference to. Several months ago a cat ran underneath a Waymo and the vehicle's rear tire ran over it while pulling away from the curb. The NYT has a video [1] of the incident.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-fran...

I mean: I haven't implemented a cat-friendly update to my own driving, and it isn't clear to me how I would ever begin to attempt to do so.

I’d bet you already have a mode that would’ve prevented what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the actual incident:

A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned person kneeling in front of their car and peering underneath.

“I didn’t know if I should reach out and hit one of the cameras or scream,” she said of the perilous moment. “I sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo was pulling away with me so close to it.”

I watched the video and read the article. (I wish I didn't; I love cats. I've known some wonderful bodega cats myself.)

But I'll bet I already have a mode that makes me want to drive away from people I don't know who are acting weird around my car.

I mean: I've got options. I can fight, flee, or hang out and investigate.

But I'm human -- I'm going to make what ultimately turn out to be poor decisions sometimes. I will have this condition until the day I die, and there isn't a single thing I can do about it (except to choose to die sooner, I guess).

So to posit an example: I'm already behind the wheel of my fleeing-machine with an already-decided intent to leave. And a stranger nearby is being weird.

I've now got a decision to make. It may be a very important decision, or it may instead be a nearly-meaningless decision.

Again, I've got options. I may very well decide that fighting isn't a good plan, and that joining them in exploring whatever mystery or ailment they may perceive is also not a great idea, and thereby decide that fleeing is the best option.

This may be a poor choice. It may also be the very best choice.

I don't know everything, and I can't see everything, and I do not get to use a time machine to gain hindsight for how this decision will play out.

(But I might speculate that if I stopped to investigate every time I saw a nearby stranger act weird at night in neighborhoods with prominent security gates that I might have fewer days remaining than if I just left them to their own devices.)

That’s an interesting perspective. The way I’ve always approached it is that if someone is looking at my car weird, I should probably ask what’s up. I’ve honked over several cars to let them know their tire is flat, flagged down drivers in parking lots because some dumbass let a ton of nails fall off their work truck, etc. When it comes to cars, someone checking out my car in a “weird” way is a prompt to me to investigate, not flee.

It's a perspective, prefaced with a speech about human error. I might get it wrong -- so might you, yourself.

There remains some reason for the businesses and residents of the neighborhood in which Kit Kat was run over to have spent money to install and maintain things like security gates and iron pickets in front of the glass and entryways of their buildings.

When I find myself in such a neighborhood at night and am already intent upon leaving, is not my intention to stick around and maybe find out what that reason might be.

It is instead my intention to simply leave.

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