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Waymo Was on a Roll in San Francisco. Then One of Its Cars Killed a Cat
https://archive.ph/Axj2B https://archive.ph/Axj2B
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740161
- theoldgreybeard 11mo agoPeople driving cars kill cats all the time. I would bet much more than self driving cars will. The overall number of cats being killed by cars will probably go down with self driving cars. Letting your cat roam outdoors is cruelty.
- rufus_foreman 11mo agoAbsolutely. And it's not just cat's. Look at the number of deer that get hit by cars every year. And like I said in another post, I saw two dead raccoons by the side of the road yesterday in the space of a few miles. Cats, dogs, deer, raccoons, bobcats, etc. should all be strictly indoor animals.
- card_zero 11mo agoDammit, with this logic you're winning me over. Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play ...
- mbirth 11mo agoEven professional drivers of StreetView cars have documented kills under their belt: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKlzDjFNEP0/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKlzDjFNEP0/
- w0de0 11mo agoFascinating. I’ve viewed imprisoning a cat within a single set of rooms for the entirety of its life as cruelty. They wish so clearly to roam, to hunt, to mark territory and to meet other cats. A full life excels a maximally long one, no?
- Ferret7446 11mo agoBy that logic attempting to "own" a cat is the root of the cruelty, no? Once you've committed that root cruelty, it is more cruel to imprison it in safety or allow it to roam in an environment with known dangers?
- card_zero 11mo agoIf they feel like it, outdoor cats are quite free to adopt secondary or tertiary owners, or set up residence in a rail station or at a grocery store, and I'm certain I could find you 20 BBC local news stories about these kind of shenanigans, "well-loved cat famous in town" sort of thing. Or "incredible journey", also common.
- w0de0 11mo agoI’d disagree. As domesticated, bred familiars, the natural state of cats, as with dogs, is symbiosis with humans. They’re not wild animals in a zoo. As the common jokes go, they own us as much as we them.
- readthenotes1 11mo agoI can't wait until people who want to run red lights and steer into bus stops have to pay exorbitant self-driving fees.
- preston4tw 11mo agopast the paywall: https://archive.ph/Axj2B https://archive.ph/Axj2B
- gruez 11mo ago>“A human driver can be held accountable, can hop out, say sorry, can be tracked down by police if it’s a hit-and-run,” Ms. Fielder said in an interview. “Here, there is no one to hold accountable.” But would a human even suffer consequences in this case? Else in the article mentions: >The city does not track how many animals are killed by cars each year, but the number is in the hundreds, according to Deb Campbell, a spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control in San Francisco. and >Waymo does not dispute that one of its cars killed Kit Kat. The company released a statement saying that when one of its vehicles was picking up passengers, a cat “darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away.” In other words, it could have easily happened to a human driver, and all the uproar in this case is only because people are being selectively angry against Waymo for... other reasons: >Still, Kit Kat’s death has given new fuel to detractors. They argue that robot taxis steal riders from public transit, eliminate jobs for people, enrich Silicon Valley executives — and are just plain creepy. >... >Ms. Fielder has strong ties to labor unions, including the Teamsters, which has fought for more regulation of autonomous vehicles, largely out of concern for members who could eventually lose their own driving jobs in other sectors.
- preston4tw 11mo agoIt's obviously sad that an animal was killed in an accident, but the outrage towards Waymo and media coverage definitely seems disproportionate given statistical context, and I was pleasantly surprised that the article made efforts to point that out rather than dogpiling on Waymo.
- xnx 11mo ago> But would a human even suffer consequences in this case? Never. In the US you can drive drunk and speeding and kill a person and walk away with basically an "oopsie".
- polski-g 11mo agoYou definitely can not. If you hit someone when drunk you are going to prison. However, if you are not drunk and just say "I didn't see them", you'll be fine.
- yonran 11mo ago> Jackie Fielder, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District, has been among the most vocal critics. She introduced a city resolution after Kit Kat’s death that calls for the state Legislature to let voters decide if driverless cars can operate where they live. (Currently, the state regulates autonomous vehicles in California.) If this had anything to do with safety, this so-called “Progressive” supervisor Jackie Fielder would be investigating what safety features would be feasible on Waymos: emergency stop switches or stop commands, under car cameras, questioning whether the Waymo detected the cat and then just forgot about it when it walked under the car, etc. Instead, she is using this to secure territory for obviously less safe Uber and Lyft drivers who are represented by the Teamsters. Such a cynical politician.
- terminalshort 11mo agoProgressives always defend legacy obsolete businesses against competition. They tried to stop Uber and Lyft from replacing cabs and now they do the same with Waymo.
- lysace 11mo agoNon-US perspective: ”Progressive” and ”conservative” labels don’t make much sense to me these days. Perhaps you need another way of thinking about these things.
- terminalshort 11mo agoOf course they don't. Political labels don't cross national boundaries easily. Even right next door in Canada "conservative" means nothing like it does in the US.
- tehjoker 11mo agoYea they do when you have a firm foundation on political theory. However, parties often diverge from their name.
- dboreham 11mo agoEverything you read is in service of someone's business model.
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoIn this case, the business model of a public representative taking a lot of funding from Teamsters who are pissed about autonomous vehicles
- melling 11mo agoAn opportunity to improve self-driving to be even better than humans, who would likely not have prevented the accident either.
- chemotaxis 11mo agoI always assume that people who say this either don't own cats, bought one from a breeder and raised it indoors from day one, or live in an apartment building where you need to go through multiple doors to get outside. Most cats that spent some time outdoors will want to be outdoors. In many settings, it's nearly impossible to keep them in because they will try to sneak out every time they get a chance. Package delivery, you coming back with groceries, etc. And most of the anti-outdoor-cat stats are more or less bullsh-t. The average lifespan of feral cats might be five years. The average lifespan of a cat that has a home but gets to go out is probably pretty close to an indoor cat. And while outdoor cats can kill birds for sport, they're not causing extinction events in most places. They mostly interact with abundant, trash-feeding urban birds. You might not like the killing, but it's an artificial ecosystem we created and that can handle the predation just fine.
- terminalshort 11mo agoMaybe the stats are bullshit and maybe they're not, but I don't care. It's beside the point. Cats want to go outside so you should let them, or don't have them in places where they can't like very dense urban areas. Would you spend your whole life indoors if it gave you another 10 years? I think not. Somehow people who would never accept this for themselves have no problem doing it to their cats.
- Workaccount2 11mo agoI just want to point out that you called the outdoor cat stats bullshit, and then proceed to make up "probably true because it feels that way" facts to show that. Not taking a side, but your argument is...weak.
- jjfoooo4 11mo ago>>> They pose a major threat to birds, killing an estimated 2.4 billion birds each year in the U.S. alone, making cats the top source of direct, human-caused bird mortality in the U.S. Is this the stat you have issue with? Or is the contention that a pet on a city street at 11:40 PM is not highly at risk of being run over by a human driver? https://abcbirds.org/solutions/keep-cats-indoors/ https://abcbirds.org/solutions/keep-cats-indoors/
- Workaccount2 11mo agoThis story reads like the sugar industry calling out vegetables because someone choked on a carrot. I'm sad for the cat, but this story is still borderline satire.
- terminalshort 11mo agoAnd it will be the same when the first human is killed by a Waymo
- pclowes 11mo agoThis is a farce. Handwringing about a cat while SF drivers kill hundreds per year, and SF policy kills thousands.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 11mo agoLike I said when I first heard about this, if anybody really cared about that "beloved" cat it would not have been roaming around in the street.
- carbocation 11mo agoWaymo was on a roll in San Francisco. It still is, but it used to be, too. (With apologies to Mitch.) This is utter sensationalism. Fortunately, the state's regulations have liberated the good people of SF from being able to shoot ourselves in our own foot on this particular issue.
- whydoineedthis 11mo agoHaving jobs like uber and Lyft available - self employed on your own time - are terrific stop gaps when people lose thier real job, or need a little extra for thier familly. Doing away with them will create a much worse society.
- baggy_trough 11mo agoSo will hampering the rollout of self driving cars to further the interests of unions.
- klustregrif 11mo agoSelf driving cars have literally killed people and that didn’t throw a wrench in the operation. But a cat does?!
- elif 11mo agoThe magician crumpled his hat and the bird was nowhere to be seen. "You crushed it!" Cried the boy. "No, you see" as he opened his coat and the bird flew out. "That's just a different bird that looks the same" protested the boy and his parents shushed him... Later after the show, they boy returns and witnesses the magician dump a dead bird into the dumpster. As zizek claims in his new book, progress is not magic. It is always relative to a system and always requires us to ignore dead birds.
- chequoredDaemon 11mo agoIn japan a taxi driver was investigated and I believe fined for killing a pigeon (failing to stop his car). I don't think the Japanese revere pigeons anywhere as much as we seem to revere cats. Absurd as it may seem, Waymos should consider cats in their safety program. And GOOG has been smart in their PR unlike Cruise so I'd think they can appreciate that killing cats offends the imagination. Justice for KitKat and let's hope Waymo takes cat safety to heart.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]