We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
Posts must be:
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
one passed a stopped school bus that was unloading kids in Atlanta. That’s a violation that normally garners $1,000 fine and a court hearing, but nothing was issued to the company.
“These cars don’t have a driver, so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s responsible,” said Georgia state Representative Clint Crowe to Atlanta news station, KGW8.
No? The company has a mail address. Send them the notice and summons to court, just like you would for the owner of a regular vehicle.
When it's time for money: COMPANIES ARE PEOPLE TOO!
When it's time for punishment: but you can't hold a company responsible, it's not just one person.
Probably a waste of time until you review how the law was written. Odds are it just doesn't apply. It's a job for lawmakers at this point, not a judge.
Now, if it hits a kid before the law gets written, a judge would preside over a civil case. There might even be a civil case against the legislature, depending on how that works in the jurisdiction.
I can only speak for German law: When a car breaking a traffic law is identified (by number plate), the registered owner of the car gets sent a letter notifying them and ordering them to identify the driver.
If the owner can't or won't name the driver, the owner has to pay the fine. The law assumes that either you let someone drive the car, then you must know who it was, or at least be able to help the feds in their investigation. Or the car was stolen, but then it was on you to report the theft immediately.
It does get trickier when it's a criminal case, cause in Vaymo's case, it's difficult to determine who is personally responsible. This is where new laws are required. One possibility would be looking to the data privacy laws: Here, every affected company needs to appoint someone responsible for data privacy. In case of a violation that person is personally responsible and can be punished, including prison time, if they haven't done their due dilligence.
So for self-driving cars, every company would need to have a "traffic safety director" who is legally required to be in the loop for all decisions regarding traffic safety, has to report any legal violations to their superiors and the public, and is personally responsible for ongoing gross violations. (It's a very well-paying job.)
In the case of Waymo the responsible fiscal person is Waymo.
Only a 1000 bucks? That’s just the cost of doing business to them.
Per infraction. That'll put a cost on violating traffic laws and incentivize them to fix their software in order to cut cost.
And if you can prove intent (they were aware of a dangerous bug but chose not to fix it), then ground the fleet until it's fixed and/or punish whoever's ultimately responsible, personally.
This puts a spin on the article (which, admittedly, could have its own spin), that smells disingenuous.
She wasn't saying "yeah, those bozos will be fine in our shoddy bots run down grannies on the crosswalk", in a mask-off moment. The article was saying Waymo expects someone will be fatally struck by one of their vehicles eventually, but society will have accepted (Waymo's) driverless cars enough by then that it won't break the company. "They'll see Waymo is so much safer than normal drivers even if it still does cause some accidents." type shit.
It's still wishful corpo-speak but there's no reason to mislead.
Edit: I understand that it is the headline of the article itself but we should do better than regurgitating and echoing clickbait titles.
mainstream "journalism" is about rage baiting engagement. Anytime an article has an inflammatory title about what someone says 95% of the time they are being misquoted. In these hundreds of comments I've only seen your comment mentioning that. No one questions anything anymore, if its about something they don't like then it must be true. Even though the futurism article directly links the article its talking about and the full quote/context of what the ceo was saying. I'm not a fan of waymo (and certainly not google's evil ways) but facts seem to be a distant ancient theory these days. Pitchforks first then think later.
idk if the author chose that title maybe its futurism itself but a more accurate description would have been something like "our cars are safe but we are also prepared/preparing for when something bad happens". That doesn't get clicks tho.
Not that odd. Death by car is easily accepted by society. They are "accidents" and a "necessary evil" for society to function.
There's around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and "accidents" are just that.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in 2016. That is, one person is killed every 26 seconds on average.
Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals. So she's probably right.
More so when you take her actual statement in context: that they're actually reducing deaths by being safer. The comments on lemmy are turning out to be just as biased and ungrounded in reality as they were on Reddit.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.
However I'm pretty sure that a standard transit system not made up of single cars that can only transport one or two person at a time and spy on them is also much safer.
I agree with you, public transport is the best option. However, let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.
The difference is accountability. If a human kills another human because of a car accident, they are liable, even criminally liable, given the right circumstances. If a driverless car kills another human because of a car accident, you're presented with a lose-lose scenario, depending on the legal implementation:
If the car manufacturer says that somebody must be behind the wheel, even though the car is doing all of the driving, the person is suddenly liable for the accident. They are expected to just sit there and watch for a potential accident, but the behavior of what an AI model will do is undefined. Is the model going to stop in front of that passenger as expected? How long do they wait to see before they take back control? It's not like cruise control, a feature that only controls part of the car, where they know exactly how it behaves and when to take back control. It's the equivalent of asking a person to watch a panel with a single red light for an hour, and push a button as fast as possible when it blinks for a half-second.
If the model is truly driverless (like these taxis), then NOBODY is liable for the accident. The company behind it might get sued, or might end up in a class-action lawsuit, but there is no criminal liability, and none of these lawsuits will result in enough financial impact to facilitate change. The companies have no incentive to fix their software, and will continue to parrot this shitty line about how it's somehow better than humans at driving, despite these easily hackable scenarios and zero accountability.
Humans have an incentive to not kill people, since nobody wants to have that on their conscience, and nobody wants to go to prison over it.
Corporations don't. In fact, they have an incentive to kill people over profits, if the choice presents itself!
Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals.
I think that's overstating it a bit, of course many care, and we have people who are responsible for setting safety standards.
Just because accidents are unavoidable doesn't mean we aren't trying to minimize them and avoid fatalities.
Mandatory safety belts is an example of this. But other than that there are actual scientific studies into road safety, and even city wide implementations of such studies. At least in Europe there is, but I'm guessing USA has it too.
Just because traffic accidents happen, and we obviously need "traffic" to be able to move around, doesn't mean nobody cares.
As an anecdotal example, here (Denmark) the speed limit was increased from 110 to 130 on our equivalent to Autobahn, which may seem like accepting more accidents for convenience or efficiency. But in reality it was to divert more traffic to the safer "Autobahn" to actually reduce the number of accidents on smaller roads.
Traffic safety is as much about psychology as it is about making safer systems.
PPS:
Regarding the animals we have just had warnings about deer, and some places have small tunnels made for frogs.
And there are warning signs where deer tend to cross in almost any country that has them.
Instead of running a red light or hitting a pole self-driving cars drive full speed under a trailer and decapitate everybody, or someone falls against the car and it detects an accident and decides to pull over and slooowly runs over the person and drags them down the street ignoring all the screaming. The kind of accidents society is desensitized to are the ones they taught the car how to avoid, the fucked up shit where somebody gets hydraulically pressed to death in slow motion while 15 people film it on their phones is what Waymo is going to do.
Atleast with the running over pedestrian scenario, I would think the passengers have a manual way to interrupt program logic/stop.
Also, you'd best believe truck decapitations happened a lot without self driving, enough to mandate that trailers have those guardrails below their unloading doors.
The dragging incident actually happened in 2024 with a different self-driving car company (Cruise by General Motors) https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-fined-500000-filing-false-report-about-driverless-car-dragging-pedestrian.amp They tried to cover it up too. By the end of that year, GM had stopped funding Cruise and driverless taxis, and is now focusing only on driver-assist features.
Yeah, they had to change things, the person was hit by a human driver and flung in the self driving cars path and the human driver drove off. The self driving car didn't know what to do and dragged the body to the side of the road basically. None of these incidents took place by a Waymo vehicle though. Waymo has had to shoulder the shit that Tesla and other companies have put out. GM as you said making that "mistake".
I really dont know why there arent big E stop buttons like on every other large piece of equipment that can severely harm you
Im assuming they wanted to avoid having people get hit from behind when stopped in the middle of the road, hence the whole auto pull over thing.
But yeah they should still have a kill switch, maybe make it activate the slow and pull over protocol above a certain speed, or dead stop if operating at a slow speed?
At some point we have to accept vehicular deaths given how car-centric our society is and how distracted and unsafe a lot of drivers have become.
Normal taxi drivers kill people.
Normal truck drivers kill people.
Normal home to work drivers kill people.
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that's a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn't a horrifying dystopian world we're potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.
The ultimate solution is to shift towards more public transit options in general, and away from individual vehicular transport. Not only is it a massive burden to the environment, but it's a massive cost burden to the individuals and society as a whole.
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn’t a horrifying dystopian world we’re potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.
You need to prove this number. Looking at the behavior of current driverless cars, the software is still shit, and nothing has reached Level 5 Autonomous Driving. There are too many edge cases, and conflicting behavior points. Navigating a world of humans driving in different ways with complex urban and rural streets is a very very messy affair.
Hell, nobody in the space can even answer this simple question correctly: If the speed limit is 55 MPH on the highway, and everybody is going 65 MPH, and we know that the delta of speed is what kills people in highway car accidents, what speed does the driverless car use?
(Hint: the correct answer is not 55.)
I think society is ready and eager for CEOs to be hunted like animals, as the United Healthcare case showed.
It probably happened already and they're trying to get ahead of the news.
I feel like most of the comments in here didn't even bother reading the article before grabbing the pitchforks.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.
In context, without the clickbait headline, that's a really reasonable take. They accept that statistically, they're safer but due to large numbers and randomness a fatality will eventually happen. And logically, it's preferable to the alternative of many fatalities happening.
Public transit is safer than your insanely expensive individualized transit solution.
Society wasn't even ready for a waymo to kill a cat
"our profit margins are so good that we could stand to lose a wrongful death suit 😎"
Amazing how far the US will go to not use rail and maintain dependency on cars.... just wow.
developing the fast rail system, at least in california, it was blocked by musk and the gop(elaine chao in trumps 1st term, mitch mcconells wife). cali never tried again.
She's just being a good CEO. When GM killed 124 people over an ignition part, they just ended the company and called the new company "the new GM". And while the Chevy Cruze was getting all that press over killing people, sales increased. Because America. Y'all are difficult to underestimate.
not it
She means the political environment is so supportive of corporate wants and desires, that when they start pushing more aggressive (pun intended) changes to the self driving software, she expects it will kill someone. And that is progress in her mind.
Its the political world in a nutshell. The powerful want to do something to improve the quality of their own lives, at the expense of everyone around them.
CEOs are generally heartless asshats.
The tolerance for death due to corporate negligence in the US is at levels totally incomprehensible to me. Waymo needs to kill at least one person per week, and people will just normalize it.