masterspace

It’s not that hard and no you don’t need to re-do the whole country to make a massive impact. Making a random US city walkable would take like five years max if you actually set your mind to it.

And you'll still have drivers, and it will still be safer if they were autonomous.

one car getting replaced by one autonomous car is bullshit: It’s not self-driving that will address the systemic issues with transportation.

So now every technology improvement needs to solve every single systemic problem or it's not worth pursuing? That's your argument? Autonomous vehicles don't solve every transportation problem, they solve the problem of drivers regularly killing and maiming people.

I get being excited by a technology but it’s far from a silver bullet, on its own it addresses quite literally nothing of relevance.

Oh wow, the literal millions of road deaths every year are now "nothing of relevance".

As do collect taxis. Do I have to repeat that five times more.

No they're not. Not for the distances covered in many rural areas. Try and wrap your brain around the fact that not everywhere is Europe where there's millions of people packed into a postage stamp.

If someone wants to stop an ambulance the driver will go around them, or go out and curse their ass off until they move, or right-out push their car out of the way (because yes with blue lights on you have the right to ram, over here, the offending driver will be sent a bill for the repair of the ambulance and face criminal charges). Good luck teaching an AI to make those calls.

You literally quote the answer to that:

Again, you’d still have a delivery person for critical deliveries, they just wouldn’t be driving.

Yes. I never said that those things have no place.

Then why trash an autonomous taxi?

Then either they should have a bus station in walking distance or be covered by a collect taxi service.

Lol. You do not understand the distances involved.

The average human is not a good driver. You have to compare performance, and not just safety but also route efficiency, flexibility to unforseen events etc. not against the average driver, but professional taxi drivers.

Until we live in your made up fantasy world where the only drivers allowed on the road are professionals, then sure. But we're not, we're discussing real world performance today.

Why the fuck don’t they live at the farm.

Because they're not farmers, try and keep up with the conversation.

What’s it with USians trying to make everything as hard for themselves as possible.

I'm not American, and it took literally thousands of years of development to turn Europe into what it is today, so maybe try and have some perspective on the feasibility of your "solutions".

Like automated driving? Shit isn’t working, isn’t even close to working to the degree that advocates said it would ten years ago.

It is working, Waymo is operating taxi services in two cities successfully, and yeah, it's turned out to be a harder problem than initially realized, so were smartphones, now they're everywhere. You know what's a harder problem that will take longer than decades? Reorienting all of society around villages and public transportation and forcing people to move and abandon their cottages.

Meanwhile, public transportation is a tried and true approach that actually fixes issues. It’s vastly more energy and resource efficient and does not create socio-economic barriers to mobility.

No one's arguing against public transportation. Stop trying to make it sound like this is a car vs. public transportation thing, when it's people trashing autonomous cars and not other cars.

Drivers are still used long-haul though because there’s need to do non-driving tasks that AI can’t do, automated trains are a metro thing.

And because trains don't get you to the last mile, roads do.

You don’t want a pharmacy to wait for life-saving medicine because someone put a traffic cone on the hood.

Again, you'd still have a delivery person for critical deliveries, they just wouldn't be driving. If someone asshole wants to stop ambulance right now they can too.

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?

Yes, except that we can then compare which is safer.

So far, when done gradually and responsibly, it turns out that software seems safer.

Distracted commuters are where the accidents happen, people who should not be using roads but public transportation.

Yeah, you're right, there's no point implementing any road safety standards or technology whatsoever because it would be better if we all just instantly switched to public transportation! Thank god we live in a world where it's only ever worth it to pursue the most perfect and naïve solution! All we have to do is rework our entire transportation network and tear down existing houses and force the residents to all move into villages! What a perfect solution, totally feasible in the next 10 years.

What part of “DHL manufactured cars themselves” did you not understand. They know exactly what they need from their vehicles and self-driving wasn’t on the list.

Lol, DHL didn't specify self driving because it wasn't an available option, and they don't have the technical capability to build, not because they wouldn't want it. They have an entire page on their website stating explicitly that they are closely monitoring self driving technology as it stands to have a huge impact on their business.

Your health insurance doesn’t pay for a taxi or transport ambulance if you’re immobile? What kind of 3rd world shithole do you live in (don’t say I know the answer: America).

A taxi, you mean like a car? You mean like the Waymo taxi that was trashed?

That’s not a village that’s a farm.

We're discussing how there are people in the country who don't own tractors.

What’s the point of self driving when the car doesn’t need to move without someone in it?

Because self driving cars have the potential to be safer and less dangerous than human drivers. Waymo's safety record is already better than the average human on a per mile basis.

On your farm with ten kilometre driveway?

The people who work those jobs, also live out in the country.

No. Not securing loads is the dangerous part.

Jesus christ, you're trying to argue that driving isn't dangerous? Ok bud, glad to see you're approaching this discussion in good faith /s

There’s a reason you don’t see the likes of UPS or DHL get into automated cars, but venture capital moonshot tech companies promising nonsense on the one hand,

Yeah, cause they literally started from DARPA's moonshot program and take massive amounts of cutting edge machine learning to execute, not exactly DHL / UPS' strong suit given that they contracted out development of almost all of their software until very recently.

You can still automate the driving part of moving and delivery services, which is the dangerous part.

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.