5 ms·
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
by rdiddly 10mo ago
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoOn the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling" at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance curiosity.
- ACCount37 10mo agoBased. Anyone complaining about HN being "insufficiently outraged" should go to Twitter and never return.
- rdiddly 10mo agoI was actually wondering more about the people whose streets they are. Didn't mean to indicate that I or anyone cares what HN thinks.
- rcxdude 10mo agoThe internet lens tends to distort what's happening on the ground quite a lot. I would expect the people living there have different things to direct their ire to.
- tengbretson 10mo ago> No one seems sufficiently outraged Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough of it?
- rdiddly 10mo agoI've seen plenty but about the wrong things.
- jlebar 10mo agoNo one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US. It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths. Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide. https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
- scoofy 10mo agoSeriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country. I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith. Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street. They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing. People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
- paddleon 10mo agoHey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to: build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and train drivers to show respect for other people on the road However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.
- citrin_ru 10mo agoI've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue. What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better. Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago> a private company's equipment blocked the public roads That would be like every traffic incident ever? I don't think US has public cars or state-owned utilities.
- adammarples 10mo agoTypically people move aside for emergency vehicles
- jdietrich 10mo agoAsk any EMT or paramedic - an astonishingly large proportion of human drivers panic in the presence of an ambulance and just slam their brakes on.
- SequoiaHope 10mo agoMy concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city. That seems new or historically rare. I understand large scale deployment will find new system design flaws so I’m not outraged, but I do think we should consider what this means for us, if anything.
- mcny 10mo agoI think the blog is strongly hinting us to focus on the real problem -- the electrical utility and I have to agree. The only other option I can think of is to build some kind of high density low power solar powered IoT network that is independent of current infrastructure but then where is the spectrum for that?
- trollbridge 10mo agoA power outage should not cause robot cars to block intersections.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago
- throwawaysoxjje 10mo agoWhy would I be, when I don’t have any standard for comparison. How many human drivers did similar because the power went out?
- rdiddly 10mo agoJust stopped in the middle of traffic for no reason? Approximately zero.
- cjsplat 10mo agoA lot of human drivers blasted through intersections with lights that were out. There were indeed accidents, and so yes, human cars were in fact stopped in the middle of traffic.
- yongjik 10mo agoI've browsed reddit long enough to know that human drivers don't just stop in the middle of traffic for no reason, they will stop in the middle of a railroad intersection, block a highway exit, reverse from a highway exit, drive into a highway exit in the wrong direction, drive into another vehicle, reverse into another vehicle, and spew fume at pedestrians and bikers, all the time. Or at least frequently enough to supply multiple subreddits dedicated to these people.