While this is tragic, undeniably so, it’s worth knowing that a head on collision in Malibu two days ago killed a 50 year old man when a 20 year old crossed over the double yellow line. It was obvious seeing the car that the young person was racing and driving dangerously. It barely made the news. I only know it happened because I drove past the wreck.
Tragic about the cat - and Waymo must improve - but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.
No, We should be fighting tooth and nail against these companies. They're not here to save us from ourselves. They're using public streets to Alpha (beta if you want to be generous) test autonomous lethal weapons, and then profit off of it when it works.
I can't find anything saying waymo has a thermal camera. They aren't expensive- certainly not compared to the LIDAR- and provide extremely discriminated input on "am I about to kill something?" They're not perfect as foul weather and fog are likely to blind thermal- but they shouldn't be driving in suboptimal conditions until they have a track record of safety in optimal ones.
Waymo was started partly to save lives by Sebastian Thrun who lost a friend to a car accident when he was 18. They have about 1/3 the accident rate of human drivers. Calling this stuff evil is kind of sad.
What criteria would you consider sufficient for deployment on public streets? My experience is that people opposed to AV technology usually aren't familiar with the level of validation that's been done and tend to have expectations that are either impossible or are already met.
Waymo has experimented with thermal imaging in the past. I've never seen experiments indicating it's a particularly valuable modality for AVs, and high resolution thermal cameras exceed the price of decent LIDAR these days. You can easily spend $10k+ on a FLIR sensor with a pixel count higher than 4 digits.
In some countries, drivers are expected to prove their ability to operate heavy machinery safely, held that promise, and governments prioritize zero deaths in their spending and policy making.
In the U.S., billions of dollars that could be spent on proven ways of solving the problem are instead spend on speculative robotic car development.
Robotic cars are not the only solution. They may eventually be as effective as proven solutions that are offensive to U.S. car supremacists, but as of today, robotic cars have proven only to be better than untrained, inattentive U.S. drivers and the life-threatening domestic policies that enable them. Robotic cars aren’t trying to solve the problem; they’re trying to capture spending on the problem. If transportation policy magically changed overnight to force immediate, funded implementation of proven safety processes from other countries, the excuses given for Waymo and others to beta-test their “these fatalities are a necessary accident in service of zero deaths” robotic vehicles would no longer hold water.
Autonomous vehicles don't impede transit advocacy, and they genuinely can be massive accessibility improvements to disabled and disadvantaged populations. Unless you have a magic wand to make those changes, it seems like AVs are an improvement over the current situation?
Transit changes are not required to implement the safety changes made by other countries. The cause and effect is reversed here: safety changes make transit more appealing because safety changes tend to decrease peak vehicle capacity, but transit does not make safety more appealing to untrained and overconfident (or willfully unsafe) drivers. You can’t just focus on transit while ignoring drivers and expect people to stop dying.
I remember during the first days of Covid lockdown how 99% of the cars on the busy hill outside my apartment were replaced by transit, with a commute distance of zero miles. The people who liked to do downhill racing on that hill during the day sped up from their usual brake-screech limits of 40mph to as high as 70mph, in a 35mph residential with an unsignaled busy crosswalk. And they continued doing this until the end of the lockdown when other cars got in their way again. Transit might reduce total car volume but it would increase the mean kill rate per roadway vehicle without safety culture and spending shifts.
Regardless, people who are on transit or in autonomous vehicles are people who won't be increasing roadway risk. AVs can adopt new driving rules without the typical years of political struggle over license points. AVs also have capabilities for better traffic shaping in cities. Responding to SF's market street closure was very easy with AVs. It was the uber drivers and tourists who struggled.
Meanwhile, she persisted, we could have zero deaths tomorrow if it was important to our culture. As we each recognized, the culture clearly isn’t changing anytime soon — but that lack of cultural concern invalidates “reduces deaths” as a relevant marketing claim for robotic cars. Why is it the preferred talking point for advocates when it’s demonstrably irrelevant?
I genuinely don't understand what policy changes you think would lead to zero deaths tomorrow. We'd still have deaths even if no one left their driveway without a valid CDL and a resolve to never exceed 10km/h.
Yeah, I get that; and! some of it is particularly nonintuitive outcomes from human psych/soci that look ghastly through a rational behavior lens. There’s a lot of reading that one can do on the subject if independently curious.
So tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
Reporting. I try to solve problems just to get them solved. I don't seek to enrich myself. By the way, living in your world of profit-seeking-at-all-costs maximalism is the cruelest fate imaginable, but assholes normalizing maximized greed are a dime a dozen, ruining things for everyone else.
If that person had been a roboticist, they would have known what to do: stand in front of the car. It would have saved the cat's life. And most non-roboticists will immediately recognize this as a solution, too: these cars obviously detect humans right in front of them very well and will not move in that case. By the way, the same would have worked better for most human drivers as well. Even if you yelled at a human driver that there was a cat under the car, it would not be a reliable solution because they may not hear or understand you. But they, too, would almost certainly not run you over if you stood in front of the car.
To be clear, I don't blame the witness for not doing this in the moment. And she probably has figured this out by now, too. I'm mostly pointing out that, as more and more people learn about robot taxis, more people will known how to help in such a situation, which is clearly what she wanted to do.
Waymos are capable of seeing cats - I was in one looking at the route view the other day, and it highlighted a cat that was a decent distance away sitting in a front yard as it passed it. Then it went through a roundabout seemingly just to show it could do it.
(It then proceeded to drop me off in a weird back corner spot in Santana Row by a loading dock. Can't have everything.)
I assume once you're close enough or actually under it there's a blind spot. It doesn't seem very good at evading potholes either.
Something I hadn't thought about is, could it be that electric cars are not perceived as a threat due to the lack / different of noise, vibration and heat when compared to a combustion car?
I know animals nap under cars all the time but at least with "regular" cars they seemed to be more aware of the danger.
I'm not talking about waymo, self driving, human in the loop or any of that here, I'm just curious because I wonder if the same thing would've happened with a combustion engine and if there are any "easy wins" in terms of deterrence.
> Even if you yelled at a human driver that there was a cat under the car, it would not be a reliable solution because they may not hear or understand you.
Doesn't matter if shouting at the driver only works some of the time, that's still an infinite improvement over working 0% of the time when there's no driver.
The difference between actual zero and close-to-zero is infinity.
> The company said it does not have sensors under its vehicles, but noted that human-driven cars do not, either.
How incredibly fucking callous. :( :( :(
And their attempt to make out like people not having sensors under their vehicles is the same thing is even worse. People tend to have _awareness_ of WTF is around their vehicles because of stuff like this.
That can _sometimes_ not work out well, but it's completely different from Waymo (specifically here) not giving a fuck.
Surely an undercarriage sensor array can be done on the cheap (engineering and retrofits aside) due to the required sensing distance being quite short.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like an area where ultrasonics and cameras would actually excel at (as opposed to replacing LIDAR for core functionality, which doesn't work very well as we've found out).
I see a lot of hate on Google in these comments and I feel it's unreasnoably unfair. It's a cat. It was under a car. Self driving vehicles existing would be a great thing. Google are taking a large gamble on this. Sorry, but for this thing, I think it's just stirring up outrage.
First of all fuck google, not just for this but for all the dumb crap they pull. They don’t get a pass out of some nonsensical appeal to authority. Second, If “large gamble” involves killing things then they shouldn’t be gambling. It doesn’t matter if it was a cat, bird, person, whatever. If autonomous cars are supposed to be so much better than human drivers then they need to figure this out. Most people never kill anything while driving.
In aggregate, Google cars have killed far less fewer things than drivers per mile driven. That includes cats. Your stance leads would lead to more lives being lost. But fuck google, amirite?
These people will gladly watch human driven cars continue to run over children as long as Google doesn't get to make any money.
Last year, in SF, an old woman driving a big SUV took out an entire family of four that was WAITING AT A BUS STOP. On the SIDEWALK.
She hasn't gone to jail. She hasn't really paid any fine. The neighborhood carefully formed the street renovation committee so that the family that died would have been excluded, but the driver that killed them would have a seat if she wanted it.
When they rant about how unfair it is to let a company test a robotaxi I can't help but feel they'd also look at this problem and say NBD.
While this is tragic, undeniably so, it’s worth knowing that a head on collision in Malibu two days ago killed a 50 year old man when a 20 year old crossed over the double yellow line. It was obvious seeing the car that the young person was racing and driving dangerously. It barely made the news. I only know it happened because I drove past the wreck.
Tragic about the cat - and Waymo must improve - but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.
No, We should be fighting tooth and nail against these companies. They're not here to save us from ourselves. They're using public streets to Alpha (beta if you want to be generous) test autonomous lethal weapons, and then profit off of it when it works.
I can't find anything saying waymo has a thermal camera. They aren't expensive- certainly not compared to the LIDAR- and provide extremely discriminated input on "am I about to kill something?" They're not perfect as foul weather and fog are likely to blind thermal- but they shouldn't be driving in suboptimal conditions until they have a track record of safety in optimal ones.
Waymo was started partly to save lives by Sebastian Thrun who lost a friend to a car accident when he was 18. They have about 1/3 the accident rate of human drivers. Calling this stuff evil is kind of sad.
What criteria would you consider sufficient for deployment on public streets? My experience is that people opposed to AV technology usually aren't familiar with the level of validation that's been done and tend to have expectations that are either impossible or are already met.
Waymo has experimented with thermal imaging in the past. I've never seen experiments indicating it's a particularly valuable modality for AVs, and high resolution thermal cameras exceed the price of decent LIDAR these days. You can easily spend $10k+ on a FLIR sensor with a pixel count higher than 4 digits.
Considering that they're already safer than human drivers, I don't think you could say that they're the ones using the streets to learn.
> They're using public streets to Alpha (beta if you want to be generous) test autonomous lethal weapons, and then profit off of it when it works.
Sounds good? It’s exactly working as it should.
Robo-drivers won't fix reckless driving because reckless drivers want to drive recklessly.
In some countries, drivers are expected to prove their ability to operate heavy machinery safely, held that promise, and governments prioritize zero deaths in their spending and policy making.
In the U.S., billions of dollars that could be spent on proven ways of solving the problem are instead spend on speculative robotic car development.
Robotic cars are not the only solution. They may eventually be as effective as proven solutions that are offensive to U.S. car supremacists, but as of today, robotic cars have proven only to be better than untrained, inattentive U.S. drivers and the life-threatening domestic policies that enable them. Robotic cars aren’t trying to solve the problem; they’re trying to capture spending on the problem. If transportation policy magically changed overnight to force immediate, funded implementation of proven safety processes from other countries, the excuses given for Waymo and others to beta-test their “these fatalities are a necessary accident in service of zero deaths” robotic vehicles would no longer hold water.
Autonomous vehicles don't impede transit advocacy, and they genuinely can be massive accessibility improvements to disabled and disadvantaged populations. Unless you have a magic wand to make those changes, it seems like AVs are an improvement over the current situation?
> Autonomous vehicles don't impede transit advocacy.
Transit changes are not required to implement the safety changes made by other countries. The cause and effect is reversed here: safety changes make transit more appealing because safety changes tend to decrease peak vehicle capacity, but transit does not make safety more appealing to untrained and overconfident (or willfully unsafe) drivers. You can’t just focus on transit while ignoring drivers and expect people to stop dying.
I remember during the first days of Covid lockdown how 99% of the cars on the busy hill outside my apartment were replaced by transit, with a commute distance of zero miles. The people who liked to do downhill racing on that hill during the day sped up from their usual brake-screech limits of 40mph to as high as 70mph, in a 35mph residential with an unsignaled busy crosswalk. And they continued doing this until the end of the lockdown when other cars got in their way again. Transit might reduce total car volume but it would increase the mean kill rate per roadway vehicle without safety culture and spending shifts.
Regardless, people who are on transit or in autonomous vehicles are people who won't be increasing roadway risk. AVs can adopt new driving rules without the typical years of political struggle over license points. AVs also have capabilities for better traffic shaping in cities. Responding to SF's market street closure was very easy with AVs. It was the uber drivers and tourists who struggled.
Meanwhile, she persisted, we could have zero deaths tomorrow if it was important to our culture. As we each recognized, the culture clearly isn’t changing anytime soon — but that lack of cultural concern invalidates “reduces deaths” as a relevant marketing claim for robotic cars. Why is it the preferred talking point for advocates when it’s demonstrably irrelevant?
I genuinely don't understand what policy changes you think would lead to zero deaths tomorrow. We'd still have deaths even if no one left their driveway without a valid CDL and a resolve to never exceed 10km/h.
Yeah, I get that; and! some of it is particularly nonintuitive outcomes from human psych/soci that look ghastly through a rational behavior lens. There’s a lot of reading that one can do on the subject if independently curious.
> but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.
The greater good is not served by allowing profit-making machines to use public infrastructure to test lethal machines in.
But it is served by putting 18 year olds behind the wheels of cars and giving them free rein?
It is served when the state runs anti-DUI ads and puts up billboards reminding people to sleep when they they're tired?
It's served when car accidents are either the #1 or #2 killer of children?
I'm not sure I trust you to decide what's best for society.
So tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
Reporting. I try to solve problems just to get them solved. I don't seek to enrich myself. By the way, living in your world of profit-seeking-at-all-costs maximalism is the cruelest fate imaginable, but assholes normalizing maximized greed are a dime a dozen, ruining things for everyone else.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Reasonable human beings can put a value on being able to sleep at night while still trying to make a profit. It's insane to suggest otherwise.
It doesn't work like that.
You imply all human driving is like that one example which is the worse one can come up with, which is not true.
You imply Waymos on the street will take the 20 year old irrational driver out of the road, which is also not true.
And "I did bad but others do worse" is a terrible premise to live by.
But it has to be relative right?
If Waymo cars are statistically safer than normal cars then it is fine. What is your alternative?
Edit: you could have an issue with the statistical power itself
If that person had been a roboticist, they would have known what to do: stand in front of the car. It would have saved the cat's life. And most non-roboticists will immediately recognize this as a solution, too: these cars obviously detect humans right in front of them very well and will not move in that case. By the way, the same would have worked better for most human drivers as well. Even if you yelled at a human driver that there was a cat under the car, it would not be a reliable solution because they may not hear or understand you. But they, too, would almost certainly not run you over if you stood in front of the car.
To be clear, I don't blame the witness for not doing this in the moment. And she probably has figured this out by now, too. I'm mostly pointing out that, as more and more people learn about robot taxis, more people will known how to help in such a situation, which is clearly what she wanted to do.
Waymos are capable of seeing cats - I was in one looking at the route view the other day, and it highlighted a cat that was a decent distance away sitting in a front yard as it passed it. Then it went through a roundabout seemingly just to show it could do it.
(It then proceeded to drop me off in a weird back corner spot in Santana Row by a loading dock. Can't have everything.)
I assume once you're close enough or actually under it there's a blind spot. It doesn't seem very good at evading potholes either.
Something I hadn't thought about is, could it be that electric cars are not perceived as a threat due to the lack / different of noise, vibration and heat when compared to a combustion car?
I know animals nap under cars all the time but at least with "regular" cars they seemed to be more aware of the danger.
I'm not talking about waymo, self driving, human in the loop or any of that here, I'm just curious because I wonder if the same thing would've happened with a combustion engine and if there are any "easy wins" in terms of deterrence.
> If that person had been a roboticist, they would have known what to do: stand in front of the car.
How good is the detection of humans? 99%? 99.99%? 99.9999%? My recommendation is to stay away from the path of any car when possible.
> Even if you yelled at a human driver that there was a cat under the car, it would not be a reliable solution because they may not hear or understand you.
Doesn't matter if shouting at the driver only works some of the time, that's still an infinite improvement over working 0% of the time when there's no driver.
The difference between actual zero and close-to-zero is infinity.
> The company said it does not have sensors under its vehicles, but noted that human-driven cars do not, either.
How incredibly fucking callous. :( :( :(
And their attempt to make out like people not having sensors under their vehicles is the same thing is even worse. People tend to have _awareness_ of WTF is around their vehicles because of stuff like this.
That can _sometimes_ not work out well, but it's completely different from Waymo (specifically here) not giving a fuck.
I tend to agree with your take.
Surely an undercarriage sensor array can be done on the cheap (engineering and retrofits aside) due to the required sensing distance being quite short.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like an area where ultrasonics and cameras would actually excel at (as opposed to replacing LIDAR for core functionality, which doesn't work very well as we've found out).
End of the day it's way cheaper than lawsuits.
I don’t get the outrage. If it is moral to eat animals it is strange to see outrage due to one cat dying from oversight.
This particular cat was clearly at "pet" level for the neighbourhood.
Pets are effectively family members, so Waymo's attitude is extremely wrong for the situation.
I see a lot of hate on Google in these comments and I feel it's unreasnoably unfair. It's a cat. It was under a car. Self driving vehicles existing would be a great thing. Google are taking a large gamble on this. Sorry, but for this thing, I think it's just stirring up outrage.
First of all fuck google, not just for this but for all the dumb crap they pull. They don’t get a pass out of some nonsensical appeal to authority. Second, If “large gamble” involves killing things then they shouldn’t be gambling. It doesn’t matter if it was a cat, bird, person, whatever. If autonomous cars are supposed to be so much better than human drivers then they need to figure this out. Most people never kill anything while driving.
In aggregate, Google cars have killed far less fewer things than drivers per mile driven. That includes cats. Your stance leads would lead to more lives being lost. But fuck google, amirite?
These people will gladly watch human driven cars continue to run over children as long as Google doesn't get to make any money.
Last year, in SF, an old woman driving a big SUV took out an entire family of four that was WAITING AT A BUS STOP. On the SIDEWALK.
She hasn't gone to jail. She hasn't really paid any fine. The neighborhood carefully formed the street renovation committee so that the family that died would have been excluded, but the driver that killed them would have a seat if she wanted it.
When they rant about how unfair it is to let a company test a robotaxi I can't help but feel they'd also look at this problem and say NBD.