a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work

Silicon valley doesn't have objectives like "putting transit workers out of work". They only care about growth and profit.

In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.

The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We'd still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don't think so.

It's another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.

Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they've been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It's 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There's nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.

Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don't think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that's at all possible.

Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA

Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.

robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.

Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?

AFAIK they're as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn't the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.

Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It's possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn't making an obvious error.

IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren't already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don't seem to be safety-related bugs.

If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo's tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Source: https://www.understandingai.org/p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most

Human drivers struggle with edge cases also. I've seen a lot you drive, and as an old medic who has done his share of MV accidents, I can tell you y'all ain't that good at it.

While I have no dog in this hunt, all any self driving vehicle needs to be is just a bit better than a human one to be an improvement and a net win, (never let perfect be the enemy of good enough). And historically, as soon as any new technology becomes affordable, humans adopt it and use the snot out of it. The problem is, humans aren't very good at projecting future harm that any new tech tends to drag along with it.

I was a Waymo stan before Tesla made it cool!

https://fuelarc.com/news-and-features/insurer-study-waymo-is-12-5-times-safer-than-human-drivers/

Seriously, though. I am an avowed enemy of the grim reaper, I'm a fan of Volvos for the same reason. And I like how transparent Waymo is with their data. The independent study linked is really illuminating if you like automotive safety stats.

Waymo times than Teslas?

The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.

You seem to have missed the point. Whether or not you think that would be an easy job, the whole reason you'd be there is to be the one that takes all the blame when the autopilot kills someone. It will be your name, your face, every single record of your past mistakes getting blasted on the news and in court because Elon's shitty vanity project finally killed a real child instead of a test dummy. You'll be the one having to explain to a grieving family just how hard it is to actually pay complete attention every moment of every day, when all you've had to do before is just sit there.

At least they were used incorrectly to be just as unpredictable.

Which brings up an interesting question, when is a driverless car 'parked' vs. 'stopped'?

open standard

Soery, no, that's infrastructure.

Self-driving cars are a thing, Weymo is doing pretty fine.

But you might be able to spot a few (dozen) teeny-tiny (huge, bulky and extremely obvious) differences between a Waymo and a Tesla cybercab.

I know many people fucking morons

I almost failed my first drivers test because I stopped at a stop sign instead of just yielding on a right turn. Still to this day it seems... wrong.

We should arm pedestrians so we can shoit the subhuman filth who take rights on red.

He meddles. That much is apparent. The cybertruck is obviously a top down design as evidenced by the numerous atrocious design compromised the engineers had to make just to make it real. From the glued on "exoskeleton" to the hollowed ALUMINUM frame to the complete lack of physical controls to the default failure state turning it into a coffin to the lack of waterproofing etc.

It's hilarious to me that Musk claims to work 100 hours a week but he's the CEO of five companies. Even if the claim were true (and of course it isn't) it means being the CEO of one of his companies is a 20-hour-a-week job at best.

And its fallen back down about 30% of those gains already. Hype causes spikes.. that's nothing new.

He must have seen so much worse to not even be flinching at that.

Is it really task automation if it does it worse than a drunk human could have done it?

The rider shouldn't have to care.

Naturally, simply being in a "self-driving" Tesla is reason enough to worry.

Regulatory capture decapitation

It wouldn't say corruption, I think it's more that the law around the road was designed with a driver in mind, not with a company or even a robot. the consequences have been thought to hurt a person at fault because at the time only a person could drive

He also paid his way into a government position to shut down the government offices that opposed him.

AI = Actually Indians

AVCH

People are going to take a shit in them. And ride them around for fun

No no no, you don't get it! Humans only have eyes, so cars that only have eyes should perform just as good as humans! Disregard that humans don't perform well in fog or rain or generally anything that isn't good weather and also disregard that to match our eyes' resolution you'd need extremely high resolution cameras that produce way too much data for current computers and also disregard that most of the stuff isn't happening in our eyes but in our brains and also disregard that the point that is usually being made to advocate for self driving cars is that they should be better than humans!

There's usually buses from villages into the major cities though, it live in one and there's a bus every hour to go to a nearby city, from where I can then take a train. I wouldn't say it's that bad

I believe Austin was chosen because they're fairly lax about the regulations and safety requirements.

Waymo already got the deal in Cali. And Cali seems much more strict. Austin is offering them faster time to market as the cost of civilian safety.

Exactly. Bring back trams, build less suburbs, better apartment housing. If we want a society reorganized around accessibility then let's actually build that.

I never did say it wouldn't ever be possible. Just that it will take a long time to reach par with humans. Driving is culturally specific, even. The way rules are followed and practiced is often regionally different. Theres more than just the mechanical act itself.

The ethics of putting automation in control of potentially life threatening machines is also relevant. With humans we can attribute cause and attempted improvement, with automation its different.

I just don't see a need for this at all. I think investing in public transportation more than reproduces all the benefits of automated cars without nearly as many of the dangers and risks.

This technology purely exists to make human drivers redundant and put the money in the hands of big tech and eventually the ruling class composed off of politicians risk averse capitalists and beurocracy. There is no other explanation for robo taxis to exist.

There is another reason, though, and it's much simpler. Basic greed.

There are people who see the opportunity to make more money for themselves, so they'll do it. When it comes to robo taxis, they're not interested in class struggles, it's not about politics, their interest in making human drivers redundant extends only so far as increasing their customer base. These aren't Machiavellian schemers rubbing their hands together and cackling at their dark designs coming to fruition, it's just assholes in suits who's one and only concern is "number go up."

Even when it comes to their politics and to the class dynamics, their end goal is always the same. Number go up. They don't care about what harm it could do. They're not intent on deliberately doing more harm, they give no thought to doing less harm, they do not care. All that drives them, ever, is Number Go Up.

There's no accountability for this horribly dangerous driving, so they shouldn't be on the road. Period.

Well that's exactly what their post was about, adding accountability.

I can see the headlines... "Tesla. De-funding the police!"

Depending on how exactly the laws are worded, they might even get away without paying fines. Many traffic codes define that only the driver (not the owner of the car) can be fined, and these robo taxis don't have drivers.

this “cameras for everything!” idiocy.

That's why I'm so impressed with how well it's actually working. When they get off that really weird self-imposed restriction, it could be an interesting technology.

That wasn’t FSD. In the crash report it shows FSD wasn’t enabled. The driver applied a torque to the steering wheel and disengaged it. They were probably reaching into the back seat while “supervising”.