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Cars kill and injure more Americans than wars. Cruise and Waymo have been as cautious as they can reasonably expect to be. They both have months long training

Cars kill and injure more Americans than wars. Cruise and Waymo have been as cautious as they can reasonably expect to be. They both have months long training courses for their safety drivers, and camera in the vehicle that monitor driver attention. While the vehicles are still challenged by complex scenarios, basic object detection and emergency braking are pretty good. Neither has had an at-fault accident, excluding an ambiguous but non-injurious incident between a Cruise car and a lane splitting motorcyclist.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Having a highly trained, standing army is part of what keeps us out of war. Without it, we would soon be invaded and taken over. Historically, every time America shrinks its military, it winds up dragged into a war and having to ramp back up rapidly. There is no similar need for driverless cars. I'm American. I've lived without a car for over a decade. I don't see why we can't do more testing before putting lives at stake. I don't see why driverless cars killing people as part of their development is a thing we need to accept. Your assertion in no way clears up for me why we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Having highly trained autonomous vehicles will keep us out of car crashes, currently we just sort of lie down and take it. As though we had 10 9/11 scale tragedies every year and just kind of threw our arms up and said "whatever, nuthin' we can do" And for the record I don't drive either, haven't since I was a young man.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I don't personally see that as justification for accepting training deaths here. I'm not talking about stopping the development of driverless vehicles. I'm just telling you that your argument seems like a non sequitur to me. There are training deaths in the military precisely because humans are being trained to do dangerous things. Why can't driverless vehicles be trained without killing people? That's the thing you aren't actually answering.
    - Fricken 8y ago
      I'm not defending Tesla or Uber, they're the ones that have killed people, and I think they both were (and in Tesla's case still are) behaving irresponsibly. Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff like knowing when to slam on the brakes. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads. I wish I could tell you the risk was zero, but it isn't and never will be.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads. Waymo has been doing that longer than anyone, though.
        Fricken 8y ago
        Technically Waymo has been acting like cowboys longer than anyone. They smartened up and got serious about safety around 2015, but before that they were winging it. It was just a goofy science experiment back then. The Google self-drivng car project was under the leadership of Sebastien Thrun and Anthony Levandowski, and as hardcore engineering types their thinking was 'We'll save more people than we kill', and it was as simple as that.
        tigershark 8y ago
        And though there is no fatality for waymo, while we already one for Uber just at the beginning of their program.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        Well, to my ear that sounds like "People will still die in car wrecks and I don't even have data substantiating my assumption that fewer people will die than is true currently, but I somehow feel that if robotic vehicles are killing people, that's automatically better than if a human is behind the wheel."
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    > Having highly trained autonomous vehicles will keep us out of car crashes I hate to be the guy who says, "Citation please," but yours is an assumption without evidence. For all we know, autonomous driving safety might plateau at a rate that's lower than that of human drivers.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  > Having a highly trained, standing army... ... is why we go to war every 10 to 15 years to justify the MIC spend instead of returning to a pre-WW2 stance.
- paulcole 8y ago
  > we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing. We already shrug at the idea of people dying in cars everyday.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    Not really. MADD was effective at getting drunk driving legislation passed in the states, and likes to claim responsibility for decreasing automotive deaths by one half. There are people out there who aren't shrugging their shoulders and are actively doing something about people dying in cars.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      Yes really! 30,000+ people die in cars every year in the United States. That's roughly the same number killed by guns but how many news stories do you see about car deaths?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Someone left this comment and apparently deleted it while I was looking for and failing to find citations for actual numbers of lives saved by ambulance, for example. I have redacted their handle, but I want to leave my reply here: Because people's lives are at stake right now. Every year 10s of thousands of people die due to cars. Delaying innovation that would prevent deaths dooms those 10s of thousands of people to death in the future. You say that as if, clearly, cars never save lives. It's all downside. Ambulances save lives. Fire trucks save lives. Those are the easy, obvious answers. But I would argue that lives are also saved and enhanced by access to jobs, access to better quality food because of our complicated infrastructure, access to better medical care, etc. You aren't counting when things go right. You are only counting when they go wrong.
  - tigershark 8y ago
    There are fatal accidents caused by ambulances and fire trucks, do you want to outlaw them because you cannot guarantee that there won’t be a fatal accident during their use?
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  > Having a highly trained, standing army is part of what keeps us out of war The US is in a state of constant war. Having a large standing army enables US imperialism, it's not for protection.
- credit_guy 8y ago
  > why we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing I was going to say "nobody's shrugging", but then I remembered the killing of Elaine Herzberg by the Uber self-driving car. Maybe the wheels of justice are turning slowly, but right now it looks awfully similar to the Government just shrugging at that incident.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Having a highly trained, standing army is part of what keeps us out of war. Without it, we would soon be invaded and taken over. Historically, every time America shrinks its military, it winds up dragged into a war and having to ramp back up rapidly. There is no similar need for driverless cars. I'm American. I've lived without a car for over a decade. I don't see why we can't do more testing before putting lives at stake. I don't see why driverless cars killing people as part of their development is a thing we need to accept. Your assertion in no way clears up for me why we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing.

Fricken 8y ago
Having highly trained autonomous vehicles will keep us out of car crashes, currently we just sort of lie down and take it. As though we had 10 9/11 scale tragedies every year and just kind of threw our arms up and said "whatever, nuthin' we can do" And for the record I don't drive either, haven't since I was a young man.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I don't personally see that as justification for accepting training deaths here. I'm not talking about stopping the development of driverless vehicles. I'm just telling you that your argument seems like a non sequitur to me. There are training deaths in the military precisely because humans are being trained to do dangerous things. Why can't driverless vehicles be trained without killing people? That's the thing you aren't actually answering.
  - Fricken 8y ago
    I'm not defending Tesla or Uber, they're the ones that have killed people, and I think they both were (and in Tesla's case still are) behaving irresponsibly. Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff like knowing when to slam on the brakes. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads. I wish I could tell you the risk was zero, but it isn't and never will be.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads. Waymo has been doing that longer than anyone, though.
      - Fricken 8y ago
        Technically Waymo has been acting like cowboys longer than anyone. They smartened up and got serious about safety around 2015, but before that they were winging it. It was just a goofy science experiment back then. The Google self-drivng car project was under the leadership of Sebastien Thrun and Anthony Levandowski, and as hardcore engineering types their thinking was 'We'll save more people than we kill', and it was as simple as that.
        tigershark 8y ago
        And though there is no fatality for waymo, while we already one for Uber just at the beginning of their program.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Well, to my ear that sounds like "People will still die in car wrecks and I don't even have data substantiating my assumption that fewer people will die than is true currently, but I somehow feel that if robotic vehicles are killing people, that's automatically better than if a human is behind the wheel."
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  > Having highly trained autonomous vehicles will keep us out of car crashes I hate to be the guy who says, "Citation please," but yours is an assumption without evidence. For all we know, autonomous driving safety might plateau at a rate that's lower than that of human drivers.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
> Having a highly trained, standing army... ... is why we go to war every 10 to 15 years to justify the MIC spend instead of returning to a pre-WW2 stance.
paulcole 8y ago
> we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing. We already shrug at the idea of people dying in cars everyday.
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  Not really. MADD was effective at getting drunk driving legislation passed in the states, and likes to claim responsibility for decreasing automotive deaths by one half. There are people out there who aren't shrugging their shoulders and are actively doing something about people dying in cars.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Yes really! 30,000+ people die in cars every year in the United States. That's roughly the same number killed by guns but how many news stories do you see about car deaths?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Someone left this comment and apparently deleted it while I was looking for and failing to find citations for actual numbers of lives saved by ambulance, for example. I have redacted their handle, but I want to leave my reply here: Because people's lives are at stake right now. Every year 10s of thousands of people die due to cars. Delaying innovation that would prevent deaths dooms those 10s of thousands of people to death in the future. You say that as if, clearly, cars never save lives. It's all downside. Ambulances save lives. Fire trucks save lives. Those are the easy, obvious answers. But I would argue that lives are also saved and enhanced by access to jobs, access to better quality food because of our complicated infrastructure, access to better medical care, etc. You aren't counting when things go right. You are only counting when they go wrong.
- tigershark 8y ago
  There are fatal accidents caused by ambulances and fire trucks, do you want to outlaw them because you cannot guarantee that there won’t be a fatal accident during their use?
stuckinarut 8y ago
> Having a highly trained, standing army is part of what keeps us out of war The US is in a state of constant war. Having a large standing army enables US imperialism, it's not for protection.
credit_guy 8y ago
> why we should shrug at the idea of people dying for this thing I was going to say "nobody's shrugging", but then I remembered the killing of Elaine Herzberg by the Uber self-driving car. Maybe the wheels of justice are turning slowly, but right now it looks awfully similar to the Government just shrugging at that incident.