Your quip about stock options is actually funny, because if the engineers were killing people then those stock options shouldn’t be worth so much.
In safety critical engineering, ethics are not opinions but process guarantees. Waymo system is ML dominant, non deterministic, and validated statistically, without a public end to end safety case, formal failure bounds, or provably safe fallback under unknown conditions.
Shipping anyway is not a technical necessity but a choice to externalize unbounded risk onto non consenting bystanders. Comparing that to bad human drivers or stock prices misses the point that this about what risks you knowingly impose.
Looks like the Waymo Software team could apply at Boeing. I hear they are hiring....
I'd bet all my money, and all the money I could borrow, that a waymo would stop/swerve for a child running out before the sensory nerves in a humans eye reacted to that child. Just thinking it's not as egregious a violation when committed by something with a 0.1ms response time. Still a violation, still shouldn't do it, but the worst case outcome would be much much harder to realize than with a human driver.
Also just to add, the fact that there aren't cases of this from Phoenix or SF seems to signal it's a dumb mistake bug in the "Atlanta" build.
Yes, electronic sensors can enable the car to react more quickly: But react how?
A buggy or unexpected reaction will just lead to equal or faster tragedy.
Individual drivers are incentivized to keep their behavior (or be taken off the road). What legal incentives are there when a faceless company is involved and creates one or two drivers “at scale”?
If it gets to the point where the fine is prohibitively expensive, then the system should in fact be prohibited.
It was the talk of the school. Rumors spread like wildfire. Consensus was that whatever she did, it must have been terrible.
She had driven past a stopped school bus.
If this reaction is acceptable when a person does it, a $1 fine for a company is a slap in the face to law-abiding citizens.
whatever, close page.
So archive.ph is presumably just picking that up.
When I was twelve, a 10 yo kid from the next town over was hit and killed, his body was thrown over 100 feet when someone sped around a stopped bus with its flashers out.
In addition to that, fine the company. Calculate the fine by the usual punishment multiplied by the number of vehicles on the road. And suddenly the companies begin focusing on safety.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2XoMKwZE3o [video][1m42s]
That being said, just ticket the company and make them pay. Isn’t this how it works with all moving violations? Does Waymo get pulled over for speeding?
Eg; stop signs. The only reason a full stop is required is to ensure that drivers are taking a clear observation and to give way to other stop signs. If there are no other traffic and no other drivers to give way to. Why do self-driving cars full-stop
ChrisArchitect•1mo ago
Authorities investigating Waymo over failure to stop for school buses
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169695