Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

The person who was ultimately responsible for a defective robot operating on our public streets, at a bare minimum.

Start disabling and towing their cars and watch a solution magically appear.

> You can arrest a driver for not making space for an emergency vehicle. Who do we arrest here?

That's the best part, no one! We have finally managed to invent a system that widely disperses accountability so much no one can be held liable when something goes wrong.

The passenger

Nobody gets arrested, you get a ticket.

Since corporations are people, presumably you’d arrest Waymo.

> You can arrest a driver for not making space for an emergency vehicle. Who do we arrest here?

I get that it is technically possible, but that doesn't happen in practice.

This is the key. Personally I think you just have to something similar to an auditor or whatever. Demand that if a self driving taxi operates in your city, they assign one legally responsible person per $major-division-of-city. All accidents in that region are due to that guy.

Naturally, this will incentivise them to improve the system that deals with edge cases in their ML model, and better yet you'll have the legally responsible guy shit himself and directly manage remote drivers for his location himself. Adds another layer of accountability.

The CEO

> If a human was in that Waymo, they would have moved quickly.

Some humans would have exactly the same response as the Waymo. When a human brain gets completely overwhelmed and doesn't know what to do, it drops down into animal behavior -- freeze or flee.

Given that it's a dangerous multi-ton machine, a Waymo likely has a programmed default behavior of "do nothing & phone home for instructions".

Which isn't an excuse -- an emergency vehicle is not an uncommon situation and Waymo should know what to do before being allowed on public roads.

A failure to get remedy instructions in a timely fashion from a human is even more alarming. Google is famous for automating tasks that should be performed by a human.

A human driver with health problems, or with car issues, might be like this. Similar to the Waymo having an equipment failure.

Why are we focusing on entity A when the parent comment correctly pointed out entities B and C are not blameless either?

Eh I've seen more SUV/big car drivers act like this than small car drivers, but then I live in the UK.

A friend who lived in New York for a bit would never live there again and says driving there was an absolute nightmare; everyone's out for themselves.

And you can see it in multiple "drivers react to an ambulance in different countries videos", with America the ambulance is always blocked and going slowly. Compare to Germany where they open up the entire middle of the road by moving to either side.

Mostly agree, but choosing not to risk a new collision in order to maybe get there slightly faster (what if you damage the ambulance and are unable to continue?) to maybe help someone does seem like the right call

As another paramedic that has worked in Texas, they are absolutely correct.

What we lack in EMS is the same qualified immunity that law enforcement continues to have.

I think the most important problem here is that this is an ambulance not a monster truck. It never ceases to amaze me how people on this site will always insist that the onus should be on society to deal the fallout from silicon valley's poorly-tested and poorly-designed bullshit. In a truly just world we'd be able to charge Google's leadership as an accessory to homicide for this.

If it results in less deaths then it seems likely to me

Yes. They're safer than human drivers. Clearly the tradeoff is worth it.

Good luck making eye contact with the Waymo to gain confidence that it sees you.

> Waymo's are not about to run a person or bicyclist over.

This has only introduced more novel problems. People can completely immobilize the vehicles by standing in front of them, or placing a traffic cone. (And while this is kind of funny when done to unused vehicles to bother a multi-trillion dollar corporation. It is not funny when it's done to harass women.)

This in turn spirals into a whole new set of political problems, because drivers are collectively quite intolerant of the pedestrians and especially cyclists they share the road with. There is a lot of pedestrian and cyclist behaviour that is curtailed by motorist bullying, which autonomous cars don't really do. (Your walking in front of them being a fine example)

Things like cyclists "taking the lane" are deeply unpopular despite being entirely legal and good road safety practice. Increased rollout of AVs will only make this more prevalent and then you'll have a whole new demographic of angry people mad that their waymo is slow because it's behind a cyclist.

You can’t expect someone to not be afraid of an autonomous vehicle that appears to be acting irrationally.

In many places, traffic would not function if drivers did not e.g. make space for other drivers to change lanes. It's an extraordinary claim to say such behaviour is bad practice (or even illegal??)

I think the comment you're responding to was referring to needing to cross a backed up lane of traffic in their car, not on foot.

"Courtesy causes confusion; confusion causes crashes"

I would dispute saying it is almost always bad practice. Sometimes it is, people do dumb stuff, but in many cases it solves problems before they become a problem to start with because most humans are pretty good at predicting how others around them will react.

Stopping in the middle of the road to save a pedestrian 3 seconds while costing 5 cars on the road to wait 10 seconds is obviously dumb, but what about recognizing the gap near you in the line of cars is the only gap around for the pedestrian waiting ahead, and either slowing down or speeding up a little bit to open that gap wider which makes everybody safer and eliminates any real braking events.

You might not notice all the things people do now to make traffic move smoothly, either intentionally or not, but something as simple as a line of robot cars spreading out on a road can cause problems when traffic levels that normally leave large gaps for easier left turns, pedestrians, poor visibility crossings, etc, instead becomes a steady spaced stream of traffic that has to be disrupted to fit those other options. Very small things can result in large traffic bottlenecks. Humans aren't immune to it, we cause out own problems with things like traffic waves, but we also solve many problems ourselves without really thinking about it.

I also hate that "courtesy." It blocks traffic behind the yielding car and is often done without considering that driver's surroundings (like impatient drivers switching lanes and speeding up to overtake the yielding car, increasing the chances of a collision with the crossing car).

A lot of our society works/has less friction because of human courtesy. Systemically stamping it out of every interaction for optimization will not result in a better society.

Our systems don't cover every case, and it's better when we use human courtesy to solve the edge cases.

Options are limited on mobile

If you’re blocking ads from the news site and suggesting everyone should, are you donating to the organization to ensure the news remains available?

Those of us at work, or on our phones, have some limitations.

Tech elitism isn't cool.

It's not too hard to implement them with cryptographic protocols to prevent duplication and apply time/location restrictions to them. Moreover if you really wanted to steal a car, there are much easier ways of doing that, like buying a replica gun on aliexpress then going to your nearest intersection.

First thought would be to have the remote human over watching to engage with an emergency responder when the override is used. The remote human can then decide whether it is a real emergency or not. Either way, if any one uses an override system, a remote human should get involved. But instead, computer devs will suggest crypto/public/private keys/blahblahblah. This is one of those where the best answer will be to boot up the bio computer running the latest software

It doesn't sound difficult to solve. The sensors can classify firetruck, ambulance, red&blues, uniformed police, badge, siren, etc. At a certain criteria, they can unlock the driver door for normal human driving, perhaps for a very limited speed and distance. The officer can move it to the side, and if they crash it's not waymo crashing it. This override should send the an alert to the remote command center, so a human can watch the video and also decide how much further they can drive it. Since passenger safety is a concern, if there is a passenger inside who chooses to remain inside, the car should remain locked and not allow any driver in. The human can decide to follow police orders to exit the car, or remain inside, but at that point a human becomes responsible for obstructing. The whole freezing waymo trend seems driven by legal liability - not engineering. They know if they always freeze, their million miles with no accidents stats are safe.

And every single day you hear about someone abusing them right? Or no?

I've been on the site for years and have never seen something like that even with heated topics, the guidelines are there as a guide, but this was completely out of the ordinary (at least for me).

> owners sued firemen for pulling water hoses through their cars after breaking the windows - the law was not allowing it even if the line through the car was the only option.

I'll bet anything you have no citation for this.

Sovereign immunity and necessity combine to make sure that firefighters and cops can do whatever the fuck is required.

The aftermath is even more brutal. You will receive multiple tickets for this, you will receive a bill for damages to the hose they had to thread through your windows (or to the police car that rammed you out of the way), and your car insurance will point to a clause in their policy that says that you are personally on the hook for all of this.

You may even face civil or even criminal liability for any damages to whatever is on fire, or loss of life, that a good prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer can convince a jury is directly traceable to your egregious conduct in parking your precious car in front of the damn fire hydrant.

Sounds like trolling, but the idea of Waymo suing a responder to a terrorist attack is too ridiculous.

I meant the Robotaxi's in Texas that have no driver, which will soon be all in Bay Area and Austin, then roll out to more cities over the year.

Lol no, way to discuss something not mentioned - do you work at one of these reckless companies? I'm talking about self-driving legislation, written by those wanting to test on an unsuspecting public.

Heisenberg's Tesla - if it is doing something good, it has a driver. If it is doing something bad, it's autonomous.

Austin has Tesla robotaxis with no driver.

It's actually rather telling that HN's greatest fear is accountability.

"Multiple" being stretched to the absolute limit in this comment.

The argument that as long as they cause less incidents than human drivers they are a win has to go. Because that only works if the statistics of the environment are stationary.

But in the case of self driving cars, who do we find at fault? Have we even answered that question? I mean did the Waymo car even get a ticket for blocking the ambulance?

I think the style of incidents and circumstances are probably neglected. But, even if they're not, I think there's other reasons we notice waymo issues more. Akin to how nuclear and airplane travel are safer than coal and car travel. This might be true, but when something does go well in those aforementioned fields, we notice.

The human side of those stats, whenever I've seen them presented next to self-driving car stats, has always been an aggregate of all human driving, a vast amount of which is in environments or conditions that Waymo doesn't operate in.

These "edge cases" were required knowledge to get a license in my home country. You make room for any emergency vehicles, you don't try to score an ultra kill when passing a school bus and you certainly don't drive on rail tracks.

Now there will be a single company to sue instead of lots of individuals. If you want to be rich, start a law firm that focuses on autonomous vehicle accidents, like all the truck crash firms out there.

Can't pit a stationary vehicle.

We can and do if they are shown to be negligent or irresponsible, and at the very least are responsible for damages, hence medical malpractice insurance to ensure people get paid even if the surgeon is bankrupt.

If they should/could have known better, then we do?