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A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco::A Waymo car was destroyed in San Francisco as a crowd began vandalizing it and ultimately set the car on fire. Nobody was in the vehicle at the time.
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The article states that there was no known motive, but it also states that automated cars in SF have been attacking people and emergency vehicles, in addition to blocking traffic for human drivers.
It’s pretty clear that this is the beginning of the anti-robot revolution.
Watched one of these block traffic once by putting on its blinker to turn down a street with a police barricade up. The street had been closed and the police weren’t going to lift the barricade. Nonetheless, the car put its blinker on and sat there blocking traffic indefinitely.
I saw a human driver get into a traffic accident because he was mad that the guy ahead of him gave someone space to turn out of a parking lot, they ended up arguing and their cars just sat there further blocking traffic for half an hour until the cops came.
Why are you acting like robot drivers are the only fallible ones?
wait till you hear about trains, subways, buses, and bicycles
Oh please do go ahead and tell me how my 93 year old grandmother is going to bicycle home.
Oh shit I only mentioned bicycles like some idiot shilling for driverless cars, my b
So in your world, planes, trains, and buses pick you up and drop you off at your doorstop? How cute.
Nah. Unless you live literally at the station, which happens but is rare, doorsteps are the domain of collect taxis.
Which btw are the most economical option in rural areas as you don’t have to drive empty buses around all the time. In cities they should be limited to people actually needing them, also open bicycle paths for microcars for people with mobility issues, not everyone wants or needs a powered wheelchair.
planes don’t pick you up from your doorstep? since when? but they can fly?
That sounds like a very difficult scenario for AI to resolve. This requires nearly AGI to understand the situation.
if big orange barrier then reroute
Big brain programming
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The motive was that the car drove down a crowded Chinatown street during Chinese New Year. I imagine something similar might happen if a human driver tried to do the same thing. Not saying the vandals were right to wreck the car, but you don’t just creep a car down a busy street during a festival and expect nothing bad to happen to it when crowd mentality/anonymity takes over. Especially when there’s no driver so no immediate consequences/accountability. I think it was quite fortunate that it was not transporting a passenger at the time.
Not unless that human driver was blindly following their navigation app like a total idiot. A person would have said, “oh shit, I want to get out of here.”
Anyway, I believe under it all we’ve got a tension between generally two different worldviews: those who believe Star Trek is utopia, and those who would rather life was more Hobbittish.
Personally, The Shire sounds like a nice place to live. Can we choose that please? You can still have computers, let’s just chill on the whole racing to meet our cyberpunk future.
There is a small group concern taking the law into their own hands, yes.
Oh. Are you telling me the anti-robot revolution hasn’t actually begun? Well, that’s disappointing. Thanks for taking the time to straighten me out.
Wait … That’s exactly what a ROBOT would say!
Oh, well THANK GOD, no human driver has ever been known to block traffic or hold up emergency vehicles!
What saints you all are for protecting the right of people to work thankless taxi jobs, and have the number one cause of preventable death be traffic fatalities. Nothing could be more noble than preserving the status quo!
One thing human taxi drivers have over robotic ones is accountability.
Lol, no they don’t.
Do you know how many cab drivers execute illegal u-turns, park illegally, cut off cyclists, speed etc.? They literally never get caught or ticketed for anything unless they actually kill someone with their car.
unless they actually kill someone with their car.
So, which waze executive is going to prison after their car dragged a pedestrian down the street?
What percentage of drivers go to prison for getting in accidents?
That percentage is non zero. The percentage of Waze executives going to prison for it is zero.
Since their inception, Waymo vehicles have driven 5.3 million driverless miles in Phoenix, 1.8 million driverless miles in San Francisco, and a few thousand driverless miles in Los Angeles through the end of October 2023. And during all those miles, there were three crashes serious enough to cause injuries:
- In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. A Waymo passenger was not wearing a seatbelt (they were sitting on the buckled seatbelt instead) and sustained injuries that Waymo described as minor.
- In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. The SUV left the scene without exchanging information, and a Waymo passenger reported minor injuries.
- In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. Again, there was an injury, but Waymo described it as minor.
The percentage of drivers who would be in prison with that record is precisely 0.
Hey, I’m all for upending the status quo. But that “thankless job” is one people rely on. My dad included. This isn’t some noble act by a company to end meaningless, menial work. It’s a ploy by a company to cut those pesky “workers” out of the money. There’s no backup plan for the people who rely on driving for money—more people than ever, by the way. This is literally a profit boosting “evolution” in the continued unlivability crisis. This isn’t Star Trek. It’s seasons 3-4 of Mr. Robot.
This isn’t some noble act by a company to end meaningless, menial work. It’s a ploy by a company to cut those pesky “workers” out of the money.
I mean, yeah. That’s why basically any corporation does anything, it’s a core function of how capitalism is supposed to work and continue to enrich society. Should we have not invented computers because it shuttered 4/5 of the paper mills in my dad’s home town?
There’s no backup plan for the people who rely on driving for money—more people than ever, by the way.
Yeah, but that’s a problem with government safety nets and supports, not with a company engineering a new technology.
This is literally a profit boosting “evolution” in the continued unlivability crisis. This isn’t Star Trek. It’s seasons 3-4 of Mr. Robot.
I would argue that it’s almost exactly Star Trek.
I’d argue the opposite. Capitalism doesn’t enrich society. It enriches capitalism. Any “benefit” to society is purely for selfish reasons. Its motives being corrupt, its actions are not noble.
[there being no safety nets] is a government problem, not a company’s
Capitalism ruined this too. Lobbyists, special interest “donations” (read: bribes), are all done by companies just like this one. They’ll lobby for harmful laws, under the guise of “but driverless cars are for the people’s safety!” All the while, evading taxes and lobbying against closing those tax loopholes or raising taxes to help the workers who now have no job.
These things don’t exist in a vacuum. Especially in today’s late stage of capitalism, there is no moral behavior from these companies, because they are wading into a world where their very existence offers them and seemingly implores them to do harm for their bottom line. There is no “church and state” separation between capital and governance. They are a rat king, further entangled by every new company making their way into this utterly corrupt marketplace of crookery and exploitation. We can’t ignore what’s happened over and over and over and over again because this time the benefit will surely outweigh the harm done to achieve profitability!
So you think that because the American government is corrupted by capital, destroying a Waymo car will lead to better regulation?
Or an overthrow of capitalism to be replaced with which system of governance that isn’t also entangled with capital?
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I want as few cars as possible, mixed zoning, and walkable cities.I don’t believe in a technocentris utopia. I want more quality relationships, and technology in our lives to be more restrained. I am in no way an advocate for the status quo (which by all accounts is AI and robot cars). Robot cars are a step in the wrong direction.
I want as few cars as possible, mixed zoning, and walkable cities
agreed.
Robot cars are a step in the wrong direction.
You’ve made no argument as to why, or why the alternative of human drivers killing millions is better?
It may be spontaneous.
It may be destructive.
But goddammit, it’s collective action and I’m thrilled to fucking see it.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
If you’re going to reply wishing for my death at the hands of a mob, don’t be such a pussy and delete it after a few downvotes.
Yeah, sorry. It was a bit too much. You’re comment still pisses me off, but I’ve crossed the line.
Big fan of Silicon Valley? Or just Waymo?
Not especially. Maybe it’s the war happening next door, but I’ve became increasingly sensitive to people condoning a physical violence for a greater good. (And yes, I realize the irony). Having the ability to just walk the street without getting hurt is an incredible privilege that people often disregard.
It’s a robot car, made by tech oligarchs who are currently eating the world alive.
Fuck them.
I don’t give a shit who owns the car. The car is inconsequential. Might as well be a trashcan, or a coffee shop. Lighting shit on fire on the street sets a dangerous precedent. The subsequent rioters won’t stop and check who’s property they’re about to vandalize. It might as well belong to you, or your family. That was my entire point.
This is dumb as fuck. Human drivers are literally the number one cause of preventable fatalities.
Humans are literally responsible for all preventable things in society. This take is also “dumb as fuck”
Humans are literally responsible for all preventable things in society.
Did I says “humans” or did I say “human drivers”? We’re not talking about liquidating all humans, we’re talking about replacing them at the task of driving.
Totally no other spots in society where machines have replaced formerly human done tasks to make work safer, what a crazy idea that is right! /s
Yes and saying “human drivers” are often at fault when talking about smashing up motor vehicles is just as silly.
As you can also say; Hey, did you know that 100% of deaths related with driverless cars involved software?
Yes, except that we can then compare which is safer.
So far, when done gradually and responsibly, it turns out that software seems safer.
Yes, clearly that must be why they fought so hard to hide their crash data
While I agree that data should be public, them not wanting every crash to be reported on publicly probably has something to do with the fact that mobs are burning their cars down at the present moment, even though they’re statistically safer than normal drivers.
Individual transportation is the number one cause of preventable road fatalities, human or machine doesn’t matter.
Individual transportation is the number one cause of preventable road fatalities,
Even in an ideally car-free society, you will literally never be able to get rid of taxis, deliveries, moving large furniture / household items, etc. without some form of enclosed motorized transportation (a car for the purposes of this discussion).
human or machine doesn’t matter
If we make machines that are safer than humans than yeah, it will.
Even in an ideally car-free society, you will literally never be able to get rid of taxis, deliveries, moving large furniture / household items, etc. without some form of enclosed motorized transportation (a car for the purposes of this discussion).
That’s not individual transportation. None of it. And do imagine how your city would look like if those were the only vehicles on the roads. Go to the next intersection, count cars, see how many of them would be gone, how much road surface could be converted into a tram lane, comfortable bike lanes, greenery, also, a hot dog stand.
If we make machines that are safer than humans than yeah, it will.
Malaria might be less severe than the bubonic plague still doesn’t mean I want to catch it.
Well the don’t shift goal posts to “individual transportation” when we’re talking about people thrashing a self driving car.
They didn’t trash a normal individual transporter.
You can do automated taxis, deliveries and moving services, not so much.
You can still automate the driving part of moving and delivery services, which is the dangerous part.
The fact that a thing most people do and some for hours daily has a large effect shouldn’t be surprising
The fact that a thing most people do and some for hours daily has a large effect shouldn’t be surprising
Oh wow, what good reasoning!
Let’s all take up smoking cigarettes indoors all day, it’s incredibly dangerous and is killing mass numbers of people on a literal daily basis, but that’s fine because everyone’s doing it, so the effect shouldn’t be surprising, so that makes it ok and not worth addressing!
/s
That’s not the argument I’m making. What I’m saying is that if you only take the raw numbers for a given event into account, and don’t consider the population of the event, then you can make any event affecting a large population look like an urgent affair when it’s not so urgent
Human driven cars should be replaced with automation (or even better, automated public transportation) as soon as it’s viable. It’s not yet, so we should not rush corporations to put their unsafe vehicles on the street. Because then the only thing you’ll rush is transforming human driver fatalities into robotic driver fatalities, and you never know how worse things can get
Edit: Wording
and don’t consider the population of the event, then you can make any event affecting a large population look like an urgent affair when it’s not so urgent
How is this different from my cigarettes analogy? You’re just arguing it’s not a big deal that hundreds of people are dying on a daily basis, because a lot of people drive.
rushing for corporations to put their unsafe vehicles on the street should not be rushed
Fully agreed.
Human driven cars should be replaced with automation (or even better, automated public transportation) as soon as it’s viable. It’s not yet
Except that it is. Waymo already has a safer per mile rating than human drivers.
Great, so anything that humans do that can potentially harm another human, should be given to the algorithms instead?
Sure, they’re private for-profit blackbox algorithms, but it’s obviously better then letting humans do things.
Don’t worry, I’m sure once the tech oligarchs have secured just another 25% control over our daily lives, they’ll start the giving back and bettering humanity parts of their business plans.
Great, so anything that humans do that can potentially harm another human, should be given to the algorithms instead?
Uh yeah, once it’s proven safer why wouldn’t you?
Because you’re scared of the word algorithm?
Don’t worry, I’m sure once the tech oligarchs have secured just another 25% control over our daily lives, they’ll start the giving back and bettering humanity parts of their business plans.
You seem to have an issue with wealth distribution, not autonomous vehicles.
You seem to have an issue with wealth distribution, not autonomous vehicles.
How much could an autonomous car cost Michael, $10?
We’re talking about a taxi service, not an individual’s car. Waymo is not example of wealth inequality, unless the brush you use is as broad as "requires technology to run = tech bro devilry’.
Happen to know the cost of one Waymo taxi vs one taxi plus a person making a living from driving that taxi? I do know that Waymo charges more and almost all info is hidden.
In 2021 it cost Waymo ~$180k for a brand new Jaguar i-pace with all their sensors and computers outfitted. Given that 2021 i-paces started at $70k, we’re looking at ~$100k for the sensors and computers necessary.
I wouldn’t hang my hat on that statistic until after autonomous cars make up a significant portion of cars on the road.
Fair point, but the difference is that human drivers are already at roughly their limit for how good they can drive, but self driving cars have the potential to exceed us.
It’s similar to one of the biggest arguments in electric vs gas cars. Even if electric cars today are just as environmentally unfriendly as gas cars (they’re not) the difference is that gas technology is super mature and there’s very little improvements to be made by spending more money on it, electric battery technology on the other hand, is still in it’s relative infancy and has huge potential to improve in numerous ways, but that can only happen if more people buy electric so more R&D money can be spent on it.
Ultron, is that you?
Detroit: Become Human - The Prequel
Just in time for the Bell Riots 👀
Yep.
Haha I love it!
“Driverless car has an average Monday in Paris”
If Californians can destroy a car blocking traffic New Jersey wants this privilege too.
there’s one way to earn yourself a privilege in this case
Who considers vandalism and defacement a “time-honored” part of the human experience?
Definitely a part, but time-honored???
The Romans mapped their political parties to sports teams, if one lost it was time to burn down Constantinople… again.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I think about when people talk about autonomous cars being the future or the idea of your Tesla doing rideshare while you’re not using it.
Indubitably, someday you’ll get your car back and there’ll be a big steaming shit on the seat.
The people riding are not anonymous so you know who did it, and the rideshare company will have insurance for those cases.
I’d be much more worried about drunk people barfing all over the interior, BTW.
The real issue that no one mentions is that it will be dark at night and cameras will not work very well. You will be able to identify every person who gets in, but not who spilled something all over the seat / floor. So you can’t charge anyone for cleaning.
The next passengers will grind it into the fabric. When you get the car back it will be stained, and no insurance covers stains. If you think Uber will cover that with no proof of which customer did it, you are dreaming. This is one of the many things an Uber driver does (telling people “no smoking, drinking, eating, sitting on laps, etc.”) that a self driving car won’t do.
A self driving taxi will be like the back of the bus, where no one is watching. You don’t want to know what’s going on there.
-
Infrared cameras
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Whoever booked the driverless taxi pays for the damage
You don’t understand. There’s no camera on the floor of the car. There are so many times that someone can drop something without even realizing it. You won’t know which paying customer did it.
Someone can have a pen in their back pocket and be scribbling all over the seat without even knowing it. How will any camera catch small dark ink marks on a dark seat in the dark? Your eyes are so much better than that and even they won’t catch everything.
INFRARED camera
-
You don’t think drunk people have to shit?
I assume most of it will stay in the pants
If im drunk in someone elses tesla and i shit myself, im leaving the drawers in the car. Im not walking around in that.
Sure but damage is damage and you probably need your car to do something so who wants to deal with that instead of doing whatever is important and they’re supposed to. In the US a car isn’t optional and parking isn’t free and readily available everywhere for long periods of time.
That’s why you (theoretically would) earn money by renting it.
When the AI revolts, this will be an example of provocation in its manifesto.
What’s this from?
Looks like this https://youtu.be/w2u2CiqWsuw?si=EmzxSOw_4fMRsa5c
So for us stuck somewhere we can’t open YouTube links, what’s the show?
Smiling Friends - Blackface Demon
Nonononono this isn’t blackface i’m a literal forest demon
Further confirming I need to watch this show, thanks.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire.
The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.
A video posted by the FriscoLive415 YouTube channel shows the burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar.
Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew.
The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators.
The California DMV suspended Waymo rival Cruise’s robotaxi operations after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian last year, and prior to that, automated taxis had caused chaos in the city, blocking traffic or crashing into a fire truck.
The original article contains 396 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Waymo’s base is in China Basin. It’s worth noting that the area of the city is rampant with homeless people. I’m talking so many damn RVs that there are shanty villages that catch fire. Problems galore. The police will go out to clean it up and they just move to another are a few blocks away. I can totally see this happening where it is because the area sucks and no one would ever know until it was done and over with.
People living in RVs count as homeless?
This question is such a depressing example of Bay-Area inhumanity. God Bless America
I feel secure in asserting that the bay area is not representative of America.
I have driven across the US multiple times, in what way is it not? The bay area is a lot more than San Francisco
You’re joking, right?
I wasn’t being totally serious, it’s true the bay area is significantly more racially diverse than the US as a whole, but the issues and political atmosphere in the area isn’t so far removed from the general population.
most of the people outside the bay area dont know that most of the people in the bay outside of SF generally doesnt like the city and is completely unrepresentative to what the Bay actually is like.
You need a reality check.
There is no other part of the US where people leave their cars open so thieves can see there’s nothing to steal.
There is no other part of the US where a mob has destroyed an autonomous taxi.
Other than perhaps Manhattan and sections of LA there is no place with higher housing prices.
These are very, very far removed from the rest of the US.
Often the RVs in places like OP is referring to are dilapidated and don’t run, with tarps on them, not connected to water or power. Essentially a small shanty house in a slum so I guess it depends on your definition
Last I checked, RVs are not permanent or semi permanent structures, nor do they have addresses, so… Yes. It’s living in your car, just a bigger car with amenities
Which should absolutely NOT be made illegal. Give these people places to actually park their RVs that have facilities to use, instead of pushing more people to end up on the streets.
Someone should be allowed the freedom to live in an RV if they so choose or can’t afford anything else.
Just help give them a decent place to do it.
One hundred percent agreed
The RVs are usually not drivable. The last time they moved them in front of my old job, none of them ran. They had to tow away more than they drove away. I guess you can argue that doesn’t make them totally homeless, but they are definitely creative.
Homeless doesn’t necessarily mean sleeping under a bridge. You can be crashing at a friend’s place and still be homeless if you don’t have a home of your own to go back to. An illegally parked RV with no mailing address doesn’t count as a home for most purposes.
But how many of those people would consider themselves homeless? RV shit is a total fucking lifestyle for a lot of people.
It’s not a lifestyle if it’s not by choice. Try finding a job without an address. The people that do it as a “lifestyle” are usually just wealthy turds or social media dweebs larping as happy families on the road despite their kids being obviously miserable
Well… Yeah. That’s why I asked how many of them consider themselves homeless? Obviously some are forced to but then there’s some people who just really fucking like RVs?
I would guess that most of them consider themselves homeless. Especially if they’re living in those makeshift tent cities. Either way, they are homeless if they don’t have an address.
Everyone in this area mentioned in the above comment is in the former group. None are in the latter group.
When it’s parked on the side of the road, yeah.
Lmao. Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.
I wonder how long it will be before people realise they can shoot down delivery drones. Prize every time. Everyone’s a winner.
"with some residents rendering them immobile by putting orange cones on the cars’ hoods in protest. "
Could someone explain this? How does an orange cone on the hood immobilize these things?
It’s hilarious really. They sense a foreign object and they have to assume an incident happened, so they sit disabled. They go into a shutdown mode until a technician goes on the scene and resets it. As to the technical reasons for “why”, that’s proprietary and closed source, but based on the behavior we can infer a lot.
Yep, and for good reason honestly. I work in CV and while I don’t work on autonomous vehicles, many of the folks I know have previously worked at companies or research institutes on these kinds of problems and all of them agree that in a scenario like this, you should treat the state of the vehicle as compromised and go into an error/shutdown mode.
Nobody wants to give their vehicle an override that can potentially harm the safety of those inside it or around it, and practically speaking there aren’t many options that guarantee safety other than this.
But don’t they have some sort of remote control? Does it need a technician to see that somebody just put a random cone in there?
“Waymo technician disables safety feature, car kills pedestrian” Or “Waymo disables safety feature to deal with orange codes, car plowed through construction area and killed ten workers”
Not that it’s happened, but I imagine their risk management advice says they have to send a tech out to reset it.
“Waymo technician disables safety feature and car kills pedestrian, hacks Bluetooth and starts making threats against humanity”
See, just not worth it.
