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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

There's a big difference between a human present who can make a decision based on a situation literally in front of their eyes, and a computer flagging a video feed for someone in what amounts to a call center to look at and decide on.

Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.

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I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.

Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.

That's a good yardstick. Would a reasonable human driver call (or want to call) the cops? If yes, it's reasonable for Waymo to do the same

Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?

I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.

Are you aware of BART Police or MTA Police? All trains have conductors who monitor passenger behavior and enforce rules/laws.

Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.

I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.

That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?

How about things taking place outside the car?

Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?

Btw ghost guns are not all instantly illegal.

I don’t think a train conductor would normally intervene if they saw someone escorting an intoxicated person.

Unfortunately taking someone somewhere to rob or assault them doesn’t look that different from taking a drunk friend to a safe place.

Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.

I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.

No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.

But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.

You can raise that argument when they actually prevent you from owning your own vehicle.

No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.

It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.

"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)

I meant to imply that it's ridiculous because no one is trying to make that happen...

I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly. And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.

That is acceptable (and even desirable) for these people.

Only the few who can afford luxury deserve privacy.

This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?

>its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel

Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?

>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

Absolutely.

>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

>Absolutely.

Citation needed.

Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.

There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.

Fortunately the Fourth Amendment has mostly established the answer for us already.

No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.

> Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?

It absolutely does 1000x. You can also just not use it.

They snap me crossing the street almost daily, nothing I can do about since sometimes they take me by surprise.

What?

I meant catch me crossing and take photos, scans, etc.

Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.

> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.

I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?

> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.

My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.

> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.

What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.

> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.

Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.

If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.

Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.

> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.

When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?

> alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse

Almost all private cars are unmonitored (in this respect).

"Unmonitored transit" like the way almost every human being in the history of the world has moved from one place to another? Please.

I'm pretty wary of mass public surveillance. I'm much less concerned about companies monitoring the inside of their private property

When they are one in the same, how do you plead?

I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.

People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.

When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)

A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.

The number of people expecting drivers to calmly & accurately distinguish between real threats and not is wild.

Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?

That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.

I would be unless there was a posted no guns sign. Remote areas are were it is most appropriate to have a gun for personal protection.

It is generally not legal to open carry in California.

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