Self-driving cars have flooded San Francisco’s streets, and not everyone is happy. Street activists have been using a low-tech solution to incapacitate the vehicles.
Self-driving cars have flooded San Francisco’s streets, and not everyone is happy. Street activists have been using a low-tech solution to incapacitate the vehicles.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for this so-called coning incident and dozens of others over the past few months.
The group’s goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco’s streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.
She points out that when tech companies test their products in the city, residents don’t have much say in those decisions: “There’s been various iterations of this where it’s like, ‘Oh, yep, let’s try that out in San Francisco again,’ with very little input from anyone who lives here.”
Safe Street Rebel has cataloged hundreds of near misses and blunders with Cruise and Waymo vehicles over the past few months — even without traffic cones.
Those incidents include driving through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to move for first responders.
“The traffic cone protest is an example of how things in the real world can really confound machines, even ones as sophisticated and finely tuned as this,” says Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who studies the tech industry.
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