What an odd thing to say…
We are? Huh.
Maybe that someone is a CEO?
I would not shed a tear if that happened.
“our profit margins are so good that we could stand to lose a wrongful death suit 😎”
At some point we have to accept vehicular deaths given how car-centric our society is and how distracted and unsafe a lot of drivers have become.
Normal taxi drivers kill people.
Normal truck drivers kill people.
Normal home to work drivers kill people.
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn’t a horrifying dystopian world we’re potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.
The ultimate solution is to shift towards more public transit options in general, and away from individual vehicular transport. Not only is it a massive burden to the environment, but it’s a massive cost burden to the individuals and society as a whole.
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn’t a horrifying dystopian world we’re potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.
You need to prove this number. Looking at the behavior of current driverless cars, the software is still shit, and nothing has reached Level 5 Autonomous Driving. There are too many edge cases, and conflicting behavior points. Navigating a world of humans driving in different ways with complex urban and rural streets is a very very messy affair.
Hell, nobody in the space can even answer this simple question correctly: If the speed limit is 55 MPH on the highway, and everybody is going 65 MPH, and we know that the delta of speed is what kills people in highway car accidents, what speed does the driverless car use?
(Hint: the correct answer is not 55.)
i think people are much worse drivers than you think they are… you just hear about every self driving accident because it’s newsworthy right now
apparently
Self-driving cars are more than twice as likely to be involved in an accident compared to human-driven cars, but some studies suggest they are considerably less injurious (and fatal) than human-operated vehicle crashes.
https://financebuzz.com/self-driving-car-statistics-2025
not a primary source, but their data seems to be from the NHSTA
Watch “Upload” on prime. Literally about this.
yeah… very much public health attitude
Except there’s a difference between a machine killing somebody because it was programmed to and a person killing somebody on accident. One of those things has people making decisions who are not going to be held responsible.
The other problem is it creates openings for malicious actors: if your government (or even Saudi Arabia, or Israel) for instance wanted to kill a political dissident they could add a self erasing line of code to a car to run over a specific person.
This is why self driving laws need to be explicit about how they’re approaching this otherwise you’re inviting in a lot of suspicious behavior by amoral companies. There needs to be safeguards on how and who has access to self driving code.
I would say that source code for any self driving or autonomous machine in a public street should be held by insurance companies or a third party who performs regular validation checks on vehicle codes (which could be read and validated at charging stations or gas stations) and it should only be edited by publicly licensed software engineers whose licenses can be revoked for bad behavior.
Anything less is inviting a series of predictable public safety fiascos.
If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that’s a positive improvement to society any way you slice it.
The “if” in this sentence is a load bearing word.
With today’s crew running the policy, I don’t think anyone will prevent corporations from unleashing completely unsafe robotic taxis on the public that’ll perform well worse than regular ones. I really wish people would stop making this argument to the corporation’s benefit until we have some data backing it up.
I get that there’s a theoretical possibility that still imperfect robotic taxis could outperform humans, but that’s just theoretical.
With the way corporate accountability is handled (i.e., corporations aren’t held accountable) nowadays, I just don’t see robotic taxis as much more than an accountability sink and at this point I’d prefer taking regular taxis because at least there is someone to fucking hold accountable when things go wrong.
also, who’s getting the most injured? pedestrians, or occupants?
if the net rate of injuries increases among a vulnerable group, that is not okay
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I agree, the consequences should be severe.
With that said, airlines kill people and all it chiefly results in is a fine to act as a disbursement to the families.
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Rage bait.
Not that odd. Death by car is easily accepted by society. They are “accidents” and a “necessary evil” for society to function.
There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in 2016. That is, one person is killed every 26 seconds on average.
Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals. So she’s probably right.
Self driving cars will have far less accidents and deaths than human driven cars. But the idea of being killed by human error is acceptable to us but the idea of a machine fucking up and killing us is terrifying, even if it means one self driving accident will create algorithms to avoid that same incident on all cars. Whereas human error can happen over and over in the same situation
More so when you take her actual statement in context: that they’re actually reducing deaths by being safer. The comments on lemmy are turning out to be just as biased and ungrounded in reality as they were on Reddit.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.
However I’m pretty sure that a standard transit system not made up of single cars that can only transport one or two person at a time and spy on them is also much safer.
I agree with you, public transport is the best option. However, let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
Wow, you think the “company’s data” is a trustworthy source? Where is your critical thinking skills?
They released actual data in line with the NHTSA regulations. If the data is falsified that’d be illegal. Do you have a reason to think otherwise?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-order-crash-reporting
If the data is falsified that’d be illegal.
Oh no! It would be illegal!
And what would be the punishment if it was found out that they released illegal data? A fine that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars? On top of their tens of millions of dollars of profits?
Do you have a reason to think otherwise?
Yes, they are directly incentivized to either push their data in a biased direction or outright falsify their numbers, in order to facilitate the marketing strategy of these taxis being a “safe” technology, and increase their profit margin.
Fuck… have we learned nothing from the tobacco industry?!
Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals.
I think that’s overstating it a bit, of course many care, and we have people who are responsible for setting safety standards.
Just because accidents are unavoidable doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to minimize them and avoid fatalities.Mandatory safety belts is an example of this. But other than that there are actual scientific studies into road safety, and even city wide implementations of such studies. At least in Europe there is, but I’m guessing USA has it too.
Just because traffic accidents happen, and we obviously need “traffic” to be able to move around, doesn’t mean nobody cares.
As an anecdotal example, here (Denmark) the speed limit was increased from 110 to 130 on our equivalent to Autobahn, which may seem like accepting more accidents for convenience or efficiency. But in reality it was to divert more traffic to the safer “Autobahn” to actually reduce the number of accidents on smaller roads.
Traffic safety is as much about psychology as it is about making safer systems.
PPS:
Regarding the animals we have just had warnings about deer, and some places have small tunnels made for frogs.
And there are warning signs where deer tend to cross in almost any country that has them.There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.
The difference is accountability. If a human kills another human because of a car accident, they are liable, even criminally liable, given the right circumstances. If a driverless car kills another human because of a car accident, you’re presented with a lose-lose scenario, depending on the legal implementation:
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If the car manufacturer says that somebody must be behind the wheel, even though the car is doing all of the driving, the person is suddenly liable for the accident. They are expected to just sit there and watch for a potential accident, but the behavior of what an AI model will do is undefined. Is the model going to stop in front of that passenger as expected? How long do they wait to see before they take back control? It’s not like cruise control, a feature that only controls part of the car, where they know exactly how it behaves and when to take back control. It’s the equivalent of asking a person to watch a panel with a single red light for an hour, and push a button as fast as possible when it blinks for a half-second.
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If the model is truly driverless (like these taxis), then NOBODY is liable for the accident. The company behind it might get sued, or might end up in a class-action lawsuit, but there is no criminal liability, and none of these lawsuits will result in enough financial impact to facilitate change. The companies have no incentive to fix their software, and will continue to parrot this shitty line about how it’s somehow better than humans at driving, despite these easily hackable scenarios and zero accountability.
Humans have an incentive to not kill people, since nobody wants to have that on their conscience, and nobody wants to go to prison over it.
Corporations don’t. In fact, they have an incentive to kill people over profits, if the choice presents itself!
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Public transit is safer than your insanely expensive individualized transit solution.
I nominate Stephen Miller as the sacrifice to the Waymo AI…
Remember gross negligence counts as human sacrifice!
They already killed a much loved bodega cat, to some outrage, though in reality probably acceptance that the loss of bodega cats is the necessary price of progress. Maybe they can replace the cats with AI or something?
I feel like most of the comments in here didn’t even bother reading the article before grabbing the pitchforks.
Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.
In context, without the clickbait headline, that’s a really reasonable take. They accept that statistically, they’re safer but due to large numbers and randomness a fatality will eventually happen. And logically, it’s preferable to the alternative of many fatalities happening.
Very true. I wonder about accountability though.
This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.
Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.
You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.
I think the reaction here means that the CEO is wrong. People care more about revenge and punishment than about harm reduction. They prefer more deaths on the road as long as it’s humans doing the killing, because we can put them in jail.
Depends who they’re offering to kill tbh
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Someone offers you a button. If you push it, you get a driverless taxi ride for $20 but there’s a small chance that a random person in your city dies. Do you push the button?
Another button gets you a taxi ride with driver for $25, but there’s a slightly higher chance that a random person in your city dies. Which button do you prefer?
Pressing neither of the buttons also means a random person dies in the city fairly soon.
That’s fair. I’m generally in favor of automating cars given how horrifically bad humans are at operating them, I just don’t trust the free market to decide how low the odds need to be before the button can be put on the market.
The unfortunate alternative is public opinion and human emotions, manipulated by large corpos, so it’s not a great choice.
Yeah, if you can send them after specific targets I’d call that a premium feature.
No, we are fucking not. What the fuck?!
The tolerance for death due to corporate negligence in the US is at levels totally incomprehensible to me. Waymo needs to kill at least one person per week, and people will just normalize it.
Look up how many automobile fatalities there are per thousand miles driven, and how many waymo has power thousand miles driven
Aren’t waymos safer than human drivers? Why are we shitting on something that will reduce a huge source of death and injury?
Oh bud, are you new here? Welcome. This particular corner bar of the Internet that you’ve stumbled into doesn’t take kindly to technology that severs the person from the job.
Which is fucking weird tbh. You’d think this demographic would be the most logical about stuff and understanding that this is a step towards fully automated luxury gay space communism.
It’s all in the method. Some bots can fuck us. Other bots can go fuck themselves.
Put the kids back in the factories I say
Hopefully one of the AI-touting CEOs first.
Cover up incoming…
Bets on that a car attempted to drive thru a chained-off or roped-off parking lot. Car vs steel cable? Someone or something went airborne.
How can you be sure there wasn’t already a cover up?
