[gortok]

The comments in this thread are wild.

Folks in this thread are trying to compare Waymo to human driving as some sort of expectation setting threshold. If humans can’t be perfect why should we expect machines to be?

We don’t expect humans to be perfect. When a human breaks the law we punish them. When they are sued civilly and found liable, we take their money/property.

There’s also a sense of self-preservation that guides human decision making that doesn’t guide computers.

Until we account for the agency that comes along with accountability, and the self-preservation mechanisms that keep humans from driving someone else onto a light rail track, we are making a false equivalence in saying that somehow we can’t expect machines to be as good as humans. We should expect exactly that if we’re giving them human agency but not human accountability, and while they still lack the sense of preservation of self or others.

[shputil]

Because we necessarily need higher standards for a self-driving system than for humans. A human failure is isolated; a machine failure is systemic.

I, as a somewhat normal driver, am not personally at much risk if some other driver decides to drive on the rails. That won't be true if I'm in a Waymo and there's nothing I can do about its bugs.

And I don't blame people who are skeptical that Waymo will be properly punished. In fact, do you suppose they were punished here?

[xnx]

> A human failure is isolated; a machine failure is systemic.

Some truth to this, but a machine failure can be patched for all cars. There's no effective way to patch a problem with all human drivers.

[bicepjai]

I totally agree the comment threads are definitely wild. People always assume we are against the technology. We expect more precision from machines, and that’s why they exist. Many people getting killed in car accidents is irrelevant to what we saw on the video. We expect more from them and their creators, and we do not want to see experiments on roads where we drive our kids.