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One, they've got some data. Two, why is it their job to prove the problem rather than the job of the people proposing the change to demonstrate safety? Three, w

One, they've got some data. Two, why is it their job to prove the problem rather than the job of the people proposing the change to demonstrate safety? Three, why is it San Francisco's job to be a proving ground for this? I think there's pretty good theoretical reason to think automated cars are, asbsent AGI, fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants: traffic is social. And I'm hardly alone here; robot scientist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks is very skeptical of the current self-driving efforts. His predictions have turned out to be much more accurate than the boosters. And that's before we even get to the question of other impacts. So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
I wish the debate took this form. Why should San Francisco be at the bleeding edge and what will these companies give it in return?
- SR2Z 3y ago
  > Why should San Francisco be at the bleeding edge and what will these companies give it in return? Other than lots of high-paying jobs, tax revenues, and transit options? Other than the pedestrian that dies basically every week to cars, or the severe injury every 14 hours due to cars? San Francisco is owed nothing. It's a city government; it really should not be in the business of twisting companies arms to extract concessions for imagined slights. It can pass fair, objective laws in good faith. It has historically been horrible at doing that.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    San Francisco is a government that represents the people who live there. If the people of San Francisco want no robot cars until they're reasonably safe, that's a call they should get to make. If that means the loss of the things you mention, all of which I doubt would change much, well, that's a choice they can make. And as an actual San Francisco resident, I personally favor cutting back on the number of robot cars until they're demonstrably much safer.
    - SR2Z 3y ago
      > If the people of San Francisco want no robot cars until they're reasonably safe, that's a call they should get to make. Should they also get to issue drivers licenses and car registrations? Decide who gets to live there and who gets forced out? Issue my passport (I'm a citizen of SF)? Where does it stop, in your mind? San Francisco is a city that oversteps its bounds as frequently as it gets away with. It does not get to make the determination if a car is safe or not; that power resides solely with the State of California and has done so for around a century. Thank god for that, or else the types of NIMBY homeowners who live here would try to ban anyone not on their street from driving there. > And as an actual San Francisco resident, I personally favor cutting back on the number of robot cars until they're demonstrably much safer. And as an actual San Francisco resident, SF drivers are insane sociopaths and I would gladly trust my life to a robotaxi far more than I'd trust it to my fellow city residents. I think people hate these cars because they drive the speed limit and stop at stop signs, with a healthy dose of "clearly big tech is responsible for all our problems." These cars are already demonstrably safer than a human driver. If the city cares about preventing fires, they'd go after what's almost definitely the #1 cause of fires - homeless encampments. If they cared about road safety, they'd go after the #1 cause of traffic incidents - human drivers who virtually never get ticketed. About every two months I think "oh, maybe I'll ride my bike to the office." Every two months, I nearly fucking die to some entitled driver who swerves into the bike lane to skip traffic, park, or just because they're on their phone. Frankly, you are an extraordinarily privileged SF resident if you can pretend these cars are not an improvement. I am pleased that the city has no power to ban these cars from the road; it's the same set of people I've mentioned above.
SR2Z 3y ago
> So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers? The city has a demonstrated track record of acting in bad faith when it comes to tech companies and employees. I do not fault these companies for not voluntarily sharing data, because it's gonna be misinterpreted and taken out of context as much as possible. > One, they've got some data. They have data that's been taken out of context (i.e how many times do these types of incidents happen when humans are driving vs how often do they happen with SDCs). SFMTA has also previously willfully misinterpreted data to pretend that these AVs are more dangerous than they really are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc > Two, why is it their job to prove the problem rather than the job of the people proposing the change to demonstrate safety? Because Cruise, Waymo, et. al. are demonstrating safety using an objectively good metric: collisions, injuries, and deaths. It's the city's job to measure secondary safety characteristics and ask companies to optimize for them, or to just ticket cars that block fire stations. > Three, why is it San Francisco's job to be a proving ground for this? Because no city has the right to block immigration of workers or companies moving in, and the city of San Francisco does not and should not have authority that supersedes the DMV or CPUC to regulate the basic operation of vehicles in the city. If the city wants to ticket companies that are blocking fire stations, it should be more than capable of legislating that on its own. > I think there's pretty good theoretical reason to think automated cars are, asbsent AGI, fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants: traffic is social. And I'm hardly alone here; robot scientist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks is very skeptical of the current self-driving efforts. His predictions have turned out to be much more accurate than the boosters. And that's before we even get to the question of other impacts. This is what I found from him: https://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/ https://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-dri... To be blunt, I think you've misread this. Level 5 self-driving is irrelevant - Level 4 is what Cruise and Waymo are currently targeting, and they have no plans to move to Level 5 now or before they become profitable. I can anecdotally tell you that as a pedestrian or cyclist, I feel _much_ safer around these cars because I know they see me without needing to look. There's much less need for social interactions when cars have close to perfect knowledge of their surroundings. That post also *rants* about exactly this type of "safe enough" discourse: human drivers are so wildly unsafe that the instant a company can provide better top-level safety metrics it would be immoral to restrict them. You cannot ride in one of these cars and then say "automated cars are fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants." They're frankly already better traffic participants than most human drivers in SF, who act like utter sociopaths. > So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers? They do arrive with real numbers. Like I mentioned: collisions, injuries, and deaths. CPUC has also requested a lot of this data during this hearing, which AV companies have agreed to provide to the state but not the city - you might be interested in the resolutions proposed by Cruise and Waymo, and the CPUC requests for information: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K646/515646319.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K... https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K656/515656606.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K... https://amaranth-annis-9.tiiny.site/ https://amaranth-annis-9.tiiny.site/

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

I wish the debate took this form. Why should San Francisco be at the bleeding edge and what will these companies give it in return?

SR2Z 3y ago
> Why should San Francisco be at the bleeding edge and what will these companies give it in return? Other than lots of high-paying jobs, tax revenues, and transit options? Other than the pedestrian that dies basically every week to cars, or the severe injury every 14 hours due to cars? San Francisco is owed nothing. It's a city government; it really should not be in the business of twisting companies arms to extract concessions for imagined slights. It can pass fair, objective laws in good faith. It has historically been horrible at doing that.
- wpietri 3y ago
  San Francisco is a government that represents the people who live there. If the people of San Francisco want no robot cars until they're reasonably safe, that's a call they should get to make. If that means the loss of the things you mention, all of which I doubt would change much, well, that's a choice they can make. And as an actual San Francisco resident, I personally favor cutting back on the number of robot cars until they're demonstrably much safer.
  - SR2Z 3y ago
    > If the people of San Francisco want no robot cars until they're reasonably safe, that's a call they should get to make. Should they also get to issue drivers licenses and car registrations? Decide who gets to live there and who gets forced out? Issue my passport (I'm a citizen of SF)? Where does it stop, in your mind? San Francisco is a city that oversteps its bounds as frequently as it gets away with. It does not get to make the determination if a car is safe or not; that power resides solely with the State of California and has done so for around a century. Thank god for that, or else the types of NIMBY homeowners who live here would try to ban anyone not on their street from driving there. > And as an actual San Francisco resident, I personally favor cutting back on the number of robot cars until they're demonstrably much safer. And as an actual San Francisco resident, SF drivers are insane sociopaths and I would gladly trust my life to a robotaxi far more than I'd trust it to my fellow city residents. I think people hate these cars because they drive the speed limit and stop at stop signs, with a healthy dose of "clearly big tech is responsible for all our problems." These cars are already demonstrably safer than a human driver. If the city cares about preventing fires, they'd go after what's almost definitely the #1 cause of fires - homeless encampments. If they cared about road safety, they'd go after the #1 cause of traffic incidents - human drivers who virtually never get ticketed. About every two months I think "oh, maybe I'll ride my bike to the office." Every two months, I nearly fucking die to some entitled driver who swerves into the bike lane to skip traffic, park, or just because they're on their phone. Frankly, you are an extraordinarily privileged SF resident if you can pretend these cars are not an improvement. I am pleased that the city has no power to ban these cars from the road; it's the same set of people I've mentioned above.

SR2Z 3y ago

> So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers? The city has a demonstrated track record of acting in bad faith when it comes to tech companies and employees. I do not fault these companies for not voluntarily sharing data, because it's gonna be misinterpreted and taken out of context as much as possible. > One, they've got some data. They have data that's been taken out of context (i.e how many times do these types of incidents happen when humans are driving vs how often do they happen with SDCs). SFMTA has also previously willfully misinterpreted data to pretend that these AVs are more dangerous than they really are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc > Two, why is it their job to prove the problem rather than the job of the people proposing the change to demonstrate safety? Because Cruise, Waymo, et. al. are demonstrating safety using an objectively good metric: collisions, injuries, and deaths. It's the city's job to measure secondary safety characteristics and ask companies to optimize for them, or to just ticket cars that block fire stations. > Three, why is it San Francisco's job to be a proving ground for this? Because no city has the right to block immigration of workers or companies moving in, and the city of San Francisco does not and should not have authority that supersedes the DMV or CPUC to regulate the basic operation of vehicles in the city. If the city wants to ticket companies that are blocking fire stations, it should be more than capable of legislating that on its own. > I think there's pretty good theoretical reason to think automated cars are, asbsent AGI, fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants: traffic is social. And I'm hardly alone here; robot scientist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks is very skeptical of the current self-driving efforts. His predictions have turned out to be much more accurate than the boosters. And that's before we even get to the question of other impacts. This is what I found from him: https://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/ https://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-dri... To be blunt, I think you've misread this. Level 5 self-driving is irrelevant - Level 4 is what Cruise and Waymo are currently targeting, and they have no plans to move to Level 5 now or before they become profitable. I can anecdotally tell you that as a pedestrian or cyclist, I feel _much_ safer around these cars because I know they see me without needing to look. There's much less need for social interactions when cars have close to perfect knowledge of their surroundings. That post also *rants* about exactly this type of "safe enough" discourse: human drivers are so wildly unsafe that the instant a company can provide better top-level safety metrics it would be immoral to restrict them. You cannot ride in one of these cars and then say "automated cars are fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants." They're frankly already better traffic participants than most human drivers in SF, who act like utter sociopaths. > So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers? They do arrive with real numbers. Like I mentioned: collisions, injuries, and deaths. CPUC has also requested a lot of this data during this hearing, which AV companies have agreed to provide to the state but not the city - you might be interested in the resolutions proposed by Cruise and Waymo, and the CPUC requests for information: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K646/515646319.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K... https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K656/515656606.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K... https://amaranth-annis-9.tiiny.site/ https://amaranth-annis-9.tiiny.site/