With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically.
With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.
Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.
Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.
It's pretty wild to jump straight to "they don't care about safety" here. Building a perfect system without real world testing is impossible, for exactly the same reason it's impossible to write bug-free code on the first try. That's not a suggestion to be lax, just that we need to be realistic about what's achievable if we agree that some form of this technology could be beneficial.
Do we need hasher fines? Give auto regulators as much teeth as the FAA used to have during accident investigations?
Genuinely curious to see how addressing reasonable concerns in these areas can be done.
Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar?
I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
Needless to say, most people regularly violate some kind of traffic law, we just don't enforce it.
The answer is encoded in the map data in this case, but it's an interesting category of problems for autonomous vehicles.
Unlike the sibling comment, there are no lights or indications of when school is in session. You must memorize the academic calendar of every school you drive past in order to know the speed limit. In practice, this means being conservative and driving more slowly in unfamiliar areas.
The difference is usually 5 or maybe 10 mph.
Which over the distance of a school zone is nothing.
> a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed.
Because it's physically possible to approach something while remaining stationary?
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