Technology

There was a news story two weeks ago about Waymo taxis in Texas driving through 20 bus stops over a few days.

The only response was, "company officials treat this very seriously and are working on a fix."

It's bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.

But if a corporation does it it is, "Oops, we will do better next time."

Utterly insane.

No wonder Sovereign Citizens think they can get away with anything with the right paperwork.

I found this part to be even more alarming:

All of the Robotaxi crashes so far have occurred with human safety monitors—who have been trained to take control of the car in the event of a software error—present in the vehicles.

This is significant because, as TechCrunch reported on Monday, Tesla is starting to send out its Robotaxi fleet without safety monitors.

So despite a pitiful record with people trying to correct the cars mistakes, they're now ready to move on to running them without assistance?!? I am furious at the idea that our safety on the roads is this negotiable.

Wow, good thing the owner didn't fire a load of people in the government department who could prevent this.

https://www.theverge.com/news/646797/nhtsa-staffers-office-vehicle-automation-safety-firing-doge-tesla

Self driving cars have always been a stupid solution to the wrong problem.

We shouldn't be investing billions in them. We should be investing billions in creating livable spaces that don't need cars so much. Then people will be happier and there will be less pollution.

But I guess that's not profitable so I guess we'll just do idiotic garbage that gets people killed.

If driverless taxis ever go mainstream (and that's a big if), it will be from companies like Waymo, not Tesla. Tesla shouldn't be seen as a serious company. I mean, they do sell legitimate products, but their $1.6 trillion market cap isn't based on what they sell today, but what their cult member investors think they're going to bring to market in the future. You know, all the stuff that will usher in the post-human, techno utopia. It's all nonsense, and someday it will all come crashing down, though that could take a while. People can stay delusional for a long time.

Did Robotaxi just flat out steal the Cyberpunk font in order to try to look cool? It seems like a very Musk thing to do.

„But that‘s as bad as it will ever be!“ I hear tech bros reciting their mantra but then it gets worse all the time somehow.

If only there was an entity that could make rules about who and what can be driven on public roads.

I know it sounds impossible, but what if this entity could have stepped in before companies tread public roads and other drivers as beta testers for their half finished commercial products? They could have forced companies to either make this stuff work, or keep it off the roads.

Real talk for a moment: The world, but especially the USA has been on fire over the last decade. Sometimes I wonder how different the introduction of certain technologies could have been if everyone wasn't distracted by all the craziness and governments had actually done their job. I'm not just talking about self-driving or AI, as another example, but also crypto and social media in general. Would things be much different, if this stuff appeared during "boring times"?

Sorry, I'm just rambling here ...

Remember when the argument for self driving cars was that they don't need to be perfect, just better than humans?

This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.

Pretty sure that would make them as bad as or worse than drunk drivers.

Feeling a bit smug since I was early adopter of calling "self-driving" cars a grift. Remember when it was an undeniable fact that most cars would be driving entirely by themselves by now?

That would happen a lot less if they just used the LiDAR + camera combo like a sane person

But who am I to judge? el*n certainly knows better riiiiigghhht?

But at a FRACTION of the cost!

You could not pay me to get inside of any Tesla product. Crappy quality, crappy design, crappy materials, crappy everything. Just another PE for guys with itty bitty weenies.

If you like to watch your money burn, invest in Tesla.

AI = anonymous indians (with video game controllers)

One thing that really gets me is comparing robotaxis with regular driving. How about comparing robotaxis to... taxis? Would not that be much more sane?

Professional taxi drivers do get into accidents. But their per-distance metric is much better than of an average Joe driving home after 10 hours work shift and a one-too-many pint after work.

Why anyone would ever compare robotaxi to anything else but a regular taxi?

I hate this timeline. We are forced to drive next to these death machines and the corporations that own them take zero accountability and just bribe the president for more welfare and to not ever investigate them.

Our whole country is bought and paid for by evil billionaires who dont care if we live or die.

Perhaps their AI was modelled on their CEO IQ?

Human: pffft hold my beer... Wait no, I'll keep it.

Some things are just super obvious that even if we can, we should not

@return2ozma so they crash 12* more than human drivers, even though they currently *have* human drivers?! The AI makes human drivers 12* worse. Cool.