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>"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!" The 16 year old

>"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!" The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well. Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus. Do you think we should hold drivers to a higher standard so that we can hold driverless vehicles to higher standard?

danaris 1y ago
> The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well. Or that 16 year old kid could take his parents' cache of assault weapons and shoot up a mall. (They're preppers, you know.) Or he could research making chemical weapons online and release a nerve gas through his whole school. Humans have agency, and the kinds of things they can do and are likely to do are fairly well-known. Also, even the biggest, most lifted overcompensation pickup truck is unlikely to be a match for a full schoolbus in weight. A semi truck is a different story. Crash a pickup truck into a schoolbus, you might kill a kid who's right there; crash a semi truck into a schoolbus, you might send the schoolbus flying 200m spinning top over teakettle, bashing everyone in it around until they're hamburger. > Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus. Humans have also been around for, well...all of human history. Driverless vehicles have, thus far, been around for just a few years, and only in very constrained circumstances. They have also, to the best of my knowledge, been exclusively passenger cars. Dangerous if misused, to be sure, but not on the same scale as a semi truck. If I invented a brand-new self-flying airplane, and you were (rightfully) concerned about its safety, and I said "you can't source a single story of my DanarisPlanes crashing into buildings!", I would be 100% correct—and it would still be bullshit, and the safety concerns would still be very real. Putting driverless semi trucks on public roads without extensive safety testing done to the satisfaction of third-party regulators with no vested interest in anything but the public's safety is a huge difference. The problem is not that there is a chance a driverless semi truck could cause a tragic accident. It's that I don't see any evidence that we have proper understanding of what the risks are—and with a Republican-dominated Congress willfully abdicating its responsibilities for years now, unfortunately we don't have any sane legislation or regulation to give us a common framework for handling this. The problem is also that just making sure they are insured is not a solution. First of all, the insurance companies also don't have enough information to properly assess the risk, because that information simply does not yet exist. Second of all, as I implied with my earlier snarky comment, when the negative consequences of the self-driving truck failing to behave properly could very, very easily include many dead people, money just doesn't make that better.

danaris 1y ago

> The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well. Or that 16 year old kid could take his parents' cache of assault weapons and shoot up a mall. (They're preppers, you know.) Or he could research making chemical weapons online and release a nerve gas through his whole school. Humans have agency, and the kinds of things they can do and are likely to do are fairly well-known. Also, even the biggest, most lifted overcompensation pickup truck is unlikely to be a match for a full schoolbus in weight. A semi truck is a different story. Crash a pickup truck into a schoolbus, you might kill a kid who's right there; crash a semi truck into a schoolbus, you might send the schoolbus flying 200m spinning top over teakettle, bashing everyone in it around until they're hamburger. > Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus. Humans have also been around for, well...all of human history. Driverless vehicles have, thus far, been around for just a few years, and only in very constrained circumstances. They have also, to the best of my knowledge, been exclusively passenger cars. Dangerous if misused, to be sure, but not on the same scale as a semi truck. If I invented a brand-new self-flying airplane, and you were (rightfully) concerned about its safety, and I said "you can't source a single story of my DanarisPlanes crashing into buildings!", I would be 100% correct—and it would still be bullshit, and the safety concerns would still be very real. Putting driverless semi trucks on public roads without extensive safety testing done to the satisfaction of third-party regulators with no vested interest in anything but the public's safety is a huge difference. The problem is not that there is a chance a driverless semi truck could cause a tragic accident. It's that I don't see any evidence that we have proper understanding of what the risks are—and with a Republican-dominated Congress willfully abdicating its responsibilities for years now, unfortunately we don't have any sane legislation or regulation to give us a common framework for handling this. The problem is also that just making sure they are insured is not a solution. First of all, the insurance companies also don't have enough information to properly assess the risk, because that information simply does not yet exist. Second of all, as I implied with my earlier snarky comment, when the negative consequences of the self-driving truck failing to behave properly could very, very easily include many dead people, money just doesn't make that better.