4 ms·

Would you do any of those things in a regular taxi or subway car? Imagine the alternative headline saying the murderers used Waymo for their drive-by assassina

Would you do any of those things in a regular taxi or subway car? Imagine the alternative headline saying the murderers used Waymo for their drive-by assassination. There is only one option for Waymo here, and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve.

deleted 20d ago
[deleted]
graemep 20d ago
A human driver would be more able to tell a toy gun from a real one.
- jfaat 20d ago
  Probably
- anon84873628 20d ago
  So? In the real scenario, the underage passengers were drinking alcohol. Also, the 14-17 teen accounts are supposed to be monitored by parents, otherwise all riders need to be adults or their guests. That means they need to exercise judgment not brandishing what might look like weapons. The same way you need to exercise that judgment in a public park. And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.
- mlyle 20d ago
  It's not like you can allow kids to shoot pellet guns out of a car indefinitely in a metro without substantial risk of something going wrong. We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.
- smt88 20d ago
  Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun. And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
  - mehjustmeh 20d ago
    A human driver has a vested interest in determining if the person sitting behind them is holding a real gun or not.
    - t2r3121 20d ago
      A human driver can't tell. I've had gun guys mistake my airsoft guns for real ones. Average person who isn't familiar with both real guns and airsoft has no chance.
    - ryandrake 20d ago
      Maybe I would change my mind if I were an actual Uber driver, but I'm thinking that I don't care if my passenger has a gun, as long as they're being safe and not pointing it at me. I've been around guns. They don't scare me. My job is to drive them from point A to point B. Why should I care if they are packing, or if they're underage drinking a beer, or if they're texting a mob boss about money laundering?
    - numpad0 20d ago
      You literally can't tell. You can tell by touching or by extreme close inspection if you have had held examples of both by subtle process/cultural differences, or by racking if you have done so in the past in either or both, due to major internal differences. But if you think toy guns are like nerf guns painted in black, then you just can't. It's not an easy tell like wrong corner rounding on Apple lookalike aluminium chassis.
- t2r3121 20d ago
  I own airsoft (pellet) guns people have confused for real ones when I left them on a shelf in my house. If you don't know what to look for they look quite convincing these days. Take a look around https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ - everyone deletes or spray paints the orange tips because they make you really visible on the airsoft field.
- numpad0 20d ago
  Really only airsofters know telltale signs of toy guns. Guys into real guns can't instantly tell them apart. It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.
- smelendez 20d ago
  I’m not sure the line is that clear. Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.
- pc86 20d ago
  You'd never had a discussion about firearms with the average person then. Good luck.
dylan604 20d ago
That could be a funny-or-die kind of script. They find a Waymo car that is feeling outcast and looking for friendship so it joins a gang. The Waymo car is constantly looking out for rival gang members while on the job, then swings by to pick up its fellow gang members for the hit, but then must obey all of the traffic laws during the get away.
- sellmesoap 20d ago
  Or worse the waymo gets put in to 'gang mode' by someone bribed on the inside, the car rolls the window down for the drive by, delivers the duffle bags of drugs, auto darkens the windows for a drive by kidnapping, think of the UX possibilities!
  - bryanrasmussen 20d ago
    just needs to implement a shoot-first, verify later algorithm and everything is good to go! https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automated-drive-by-solution-23d82741e908 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automa...
  - Lifetrajectory 20d ago
    Even in the analog world, every situation can be exploited for criminal purposes. The Waymo initiative initially reduces the potential for harm. Is everything else just speculation?
    - sellmesoap 19d ago
      Well you can go in the direction of Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface where self driving cars are hacked to attack people, or openBSD is the OS of self driving cars and crime only receives placid self driven transport from the nice self driving cars and the proceeds and weapons of crime are carried in a way to avoid the scrutiny of the car's internal cameras. Or... there's so many cameras that crime evolves into micro-crime: the gamBean-o family resorts to fraudulent video surveillance attestation so they can build and use unauthorized micro drones to slip laxatives into the meals of their sworn enemies and rivals. It's fun to speculate :D
kstrauser 20d ago
Yes. Well, not exactly wave guns around, but say and do stupid stuff? Not in a taxi around a human driver, no. And not in a subway car with people other than me and my friends, no. But your question had an “or” in it. If we had nerf guns and no one else was there to witness? It’s not unimaginable that someone might get a nerf dart to the ear when they didn’t expect it. My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.
- anon84873628 20d ago
  Good thing Waymo yells you you're being monitored then.
  - kstrauser 20d ago
    And the sign along the highway says my speed might be monitored by airplane, but I don’t want to live where that means a surveillance drone is flying along side me at all times. Consenting to let a taxi record me in case it comes up later that I did something bad and they want to have footage of it is one thing. But now we know Waymo is a little Flock tattletale, and people generally aren’t ok with their robocab proactively narcing on them.
    - anon84873628 20d ago
      So don't use it? You seem to want the benefits of the service but without having to comport your behavior accordingly. Other countries already have highway cameras track speed and automatically issue citations. I am happy for Americans to petition their government against implementing that, but I won't pretend it's anything other than a desire to break the law for personal gratification.
monster_truck 20d ago
We used to do this and more with nerf guns, laser tag, and then paintball guns. You're not going to believe this but we even used to be able to ride our bikes 30 miles away from home without our parents being arrested. We played with fire in the park too. One time we even found porn there dude The 90s were lit Nah you're right tho let's imagine the worst case scenario. What if that person in the waymo had a nuclear bomb in their suitcase? There's only one option
- mplanchard 20d ago
  I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.
  - nradov 20d ago
    The kids I grew up with played paintball tag in their own cars, not taxis.
    - MrDrMcCoy 20d ago
      I made the mistake of using my car as a paintball tank at an unofficial range. That stuff never came out of weather stripping on the windows and left streaks every time the windows rolled for years.
    - monster_truck 20d ago
      We used to raid the "dumpster" of nearly expired hostess products at the local hostess factory, and no bullshit fill the back of a jeep with twinkies and ho-hos and king dongs, then go drive on two lane roads and throw them out in front of oncoming traffic to try and get them to chase us.
- anon84873628 20d ago
  Considering how to deal with people brandishing weapons in a Waymo is not just imagining a scenario, since it has already actually happened. I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.
stymaar 20d ago
> and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve. Given how much money Google gives to electoral campaigns, I'd argue that it is in their power but that's the least of their problems when they interfere with the democratic process. They are too busy voting for less taxes and regulations on their business.
ifwinterco 20d ago
The london riots were sparked by the police shooting Mark Duggan for (allegedly, no good evidence) carrying a gun around in a taxi. People do definitely use regular taxis to transport both drugs and weapons sometimes
tecoholic 20d ago
I am going to say the question is the wrong way to look at this. People behave differently in different situations. While I am very conflicted like the GP about this specific case. I don’t think it’s as simple as - don’t do anything you won’t do in a human driven cab, and if you do those things, then calling cops should be acceptable.
- Arainach 20d ago
  On the contrary, we have a long history of evidence that when people think they aren't being watched, enough of them will do awful things. This is why public restrooms in the US are vandalized, why there are low effort graffiti tags all over, litter in parks, and more. People believing that something is watching - a human or machine with the autonomy to enact consequences - preserves the commons for the rest of us.
  - m4rtink 20d ago
    Panopticon to the rescue - seriously ??? People just dont vadalize stuff - there are reasons for that that need to be fixed, not adding even more spying.
    - Arainach 20d ago
      Among the reasons are that kids (and some adults) are idiots. That's it, it's not income inequality or rage at the system, some people just break things because they think it's funny. That's not something you can fix, so you have to guard against it in other ways.
      - m4rtink 20d ago
        Is't that just bad education or parenting in the end ? I don t think many people with good parents & education would be essentially insane to break thinks just for fun. In general, I think you kinda need to fix people rather than make the environment basically so hostile to everyone, to prevent a small group of people from breaking it. Not saying its easy, but in my the only correct way.
f33d5173 20d ago
So murderers put their guns in a bag and get away with it, normal people who have "nothing to hide" leave their guns out in the open and get the police called on them.
- anon84873628 20d ago
  Just like would happen with open carrying anywhere?

deleted 20d ago

[deleted]

graemep 20d ago

A human driver would be more able to tell a toy gun from a real one.

jfaat 20d ago
Probably
anon84873628 20d ago
So? In the real scenario, the underage passengers were drinking alcohol. Also, the 14-17 teen accounts are supposed to be monitored by parents, otherwise all riders need to be adults or their guests. That means they need to exercise judgment not brandishing what might look like weapons. The same way you need to exercise that judgment in a public park. And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.
mlyle 20d ago
It's not like you can allow kids to shoot pellet guns out of a car indefinitely in a metro without substantial risk of something going wrong. We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.
smt88 20d ago
Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun. And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
- mehjustmeh 20d ago
  A human driver has a vested interest in determining if the person sitting behind them is holding a real gun or not.
  - t2r3121 20d ago
    A human driver can't tell. I've had gun guys mistake my airsoft guns for real ones. Average person who isn't familiar with both real guns and airsoft has no chance.
  - ryandrake 20d ago
    Maybe I would change my mind if I were an actual Uber driver, but I'm thinking that I don't care if my passenger has a gun, as long as they're being safe and not pointing it at me. I've been around guns. They don't scare me. My job is to drive them from point A to point B. Why should I care if they are packing, or if they're underage drinking a beer, or if they're texting a mob boss about money laundering?
  - numpad0 20d ago
    You literally can't tell. You can tell by touching or by extreme close inspection if you have had held examples of both by subtle process/cultural differences, or by racking if you have done so in the past in either or both, due to major internal differences. But if you think toy guns are like nerf guns painted in black, then you just can't. It's not an easy tell like wrong corner rounding on Apple lookalike aluminium chassis.
t2r3121 20d ago
I own airsoft (pellet) guns people have confused for real ones when I left them on a shelf in my house. If you don't know what to look for they look quite convincing these days. Take a look around https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ - everyone deletes or spray paints the orange tips because they make you really visible on the airsoft field.
numpad0 20d ago
Really only airsofters know telltale signs of toy guns. Guys into real guns can't instantly tell them apart. It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.
smelendez 20d ago
I’m not sure the line is that clear. Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.
pc86 20d ago
You'd never had a discussion about firearms with the average person then. Good luck.

dylan604 20d ago

That could be a funny-or-die kind of script. They find a Waymo car that is feeling outcast and looking for friendship so it joins a gang. The Waymo car is constantly looking out for rival gang members while on the job, then swings by to pick up its fellow gang members for the hit, but then must obey all of the traffic laws during the get away.

sellmesoap 20d ago
Or worse the waymo gets put in to 'gang mode' by someone bribed on the inside, the car rolls the window down for the drive by, delivers the duffle bags of drugs, auto darkens the windows for a drive by kidnapping, think of the UX possibilities!
- bryanrasmussen 20d ago
  just needs to implement a shoot-first, verify later algorithm and everything is good to go! https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automated-drive-by-solution-23d82741e908 https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-illuminati-ganga-automa...
- Lifetrajectory 20d ago
  Even in the analog world, every situation can be exploited for criminal purposes. The Waymo initiative initially reduces the potential for harm. Is everything else just speculation?
  - sellmesoap 19d ago
    Well you can go in the direction of Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface where self driving cars are hacked to attack people, or openBSD is the OS of self driving cars and crime only receives placid self driven transport from the nice self driving cars and the proceeds and weapons of crime are carried in a way to avoid the scrutiny of the car's internal cameras. Or... there's so many cameras that crime evolves into micro-crime: the gamBean-o family resorts to fraudulent video surveillance attestation so they can build and use unauthorized micro drones to slip laxatives into the meals of their sworn enemies and rivals. It's fun to speculate :D

kstrauser 20d ago

Yes. Well, not exactly wave guns around, but say and do stupid stuff? Not in a taxi around a human driver, no. And not in a subway car with people other than me and my friends, no. But your question had an “or” in it. If we had nerf guns and no one else was there to witness? It’s not unimaginable that someone might get a nerf dart to the ear when they didn’t expect it. My wife and I like watching real-life police detective shows. Sometimes we discuss mistakes the killer made, and how we’d avoid them. “I wouldn’t kill anyone, but if I did, I wouldn’t cheap out and keep the clothes I wore to do it instead of tossing them into a river.” Of course we’re not going to do that, but it’s a puzzle to solve, so we try to solve it. We would not have those conversations around a taxi driver or a crowded subway, lest someone overhear and get the wrong idea. On an empty subway or Waymo? Yeah, sure. And if BART or my cab reported us for planning a murder, I’d be livid enough to plan how to murder the computer that made the decision to rat me out.

anon84873628 20d ago
Good thing Waymo yells you you're being monitored then.
- kstrauser 20d ago
  And the sign along the highway says my speed might be monitored by airplane, but I don’t want to live where that means a surveillance drone is flying along side me at all times. Consenting to let a taxi record me in case it comes up later that I did something bad and they want to have footage of it is one thing. But now we know Waymo is a little Flock tattletale, and people generally aren’t ok with their robocab proactively narcing on them.
  - anon84873628 20d ago
    So don't use it? You seem to want the benefits of the service but without having to comport your behavior accordingly. Other countries already have highway cameras track speed and automatically issue citations. I am happy for Americans to petition their government against implementing that, but I won't pretend it's anything other than a desire to break the law for personal gratification.

monster_truck 20d ago

We used to do this and more with nerf guns, laser tag, and then paintball guns. You're not going to believe this but we even used to be able to ride our bikes 30 miles away from home without our parents being arrested. We played with fire in the park too. One time we even found porn there dude The 90s were lit Nah you're right tho let's imagine the worst case scenario. What if that person in the waymo had a nuclear bomb in their suitcase? There's only one option

mplanchard 20d ago
I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.
- nradov 20d ago
  The kids I grew up with played paintball tag in their own cars, not taxis.
  - MrDrMcCoy 20d ago
    I made the mistake of using my car as a paintball tank at an unofficial range. That stuff never came out of weather stripping on the windows and left streaks every time the windows rolled for years.
  - monster_truck 20d ago
    We used to raid the "dumpster" of nearly expired hostess products at the local hostess factory, and no bullshit fill the back of a jeep with twinkies and ho-hos and king dongs, then go drive on two lane roads and throw them out in front of oncoming traffic to try and get them to chase us.
anon84873628 20d ago
Considering how to deal with people brandishing weapons in a Waymo is not just imagining a scenario, since it has already actually happened. I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.

stymaar 20d ago

> and the idiocy of the US police is not within their power to solve. Given how much money Google gives to electoral campaigns, I'd argue that it is in their power but that's the least of their problems when they interfere with the democratic process. They are too busy voting for less taxes and regulations on their business.

ifwinterco 20d ago

The london riots were sparked by the police shooting Mark Duggan for (allegedly, no good evidence) carrying a gun around in a taxi. People do definitely use regular taxis to transport both drugs and weapons sometimes

tecoholic 20d ago

I am going to say the question is the wrong way to look at this. People behave differently in different situations. While I am very conflicted like the GP about this specific case. I don’t think it’s as simple as - don’t do anything you won’t do in a human driven cab, and if you do those things, then calling cops should be acceptable.

Arainach 20d ago
On the contrary, we have a long history of evidence that when people think they aren't being watched, enough of them will do awful things. This is why public restrooms in the US are vandalized, why there are low effort graffiti tags all over, litter in parks, and more. People believing that something is watching - a human or machine with the autonomy to enact consequences - preserves the commons for the rest of us.
- m4rtink 20d ago
  Panopticon to the rescue - seriously ??? People just dont vadalize stuff - there are reasons for that that need to be fixed, not adding even more spying.
  - Arainach 20d ago
    Among the reasons are that kids (and some adults) are idiots. That's it, it's not income inequality or rage at the system, some people just break things because they think it's funny. That's not something you can fix, so you have to guard against it in other ways.
    - m4rtink 20d ago
      Is't that just bad education or parenting in the end ? I don t think many people with good parents & education would be essentially insane to break thinks just for fun. In general, I think you kinda need to fix people rather than make the environment basically so hostile to everyone, to prevent a small group of people from breaking it. Not saying its easy, but in my the only correct way.

f33d5173 20d ago

So murderers put their guns in a bag and get away with it, normal people who have "nothing to hide" leave their guns out in the open and get the police called on them.

anon84873628 20d ago
Just like would happen with open carrying anywhere?