HN Reader

This is a fundamental problem with AI: humans will treat it differently because it's AI. So you might come up with the perfect AI driving hardware and software that would mimic the best of human drivers but it's not a human and that changes the outcomes.

We've seen examples of this where in SF people put traffic cones on the hoods of Waymos to stop them, sometimes for good reasons (eg going through a road closed to construction) and sometimes probably not.

I can also imagine human drivers treating self-driving cars on the road very differently essentially through lack of fear. Cut one off? it has no driver who might in a fit of range run you off the road or pull a gun on you.

You see a similar sort of thing with apartment buildings in NYC. Many have doormen. Will a doorman prevent someone stealing something or seeking unauthorized entry? Probably not but most people aren't that determined. The presence of a human adds a whole bunch of risk factors that an AI won't.

We see it with alarms on houses. People are often way more afraid of dogs than alarms. Or even the potential of someone with a gun.

So if this car had a driver, this wouldn't have happened. I'm sure software can be written to deal with this particular situation but you will be fighting a neverending series of human behaviors that will only happen because there's no driver.

I love that he got in because the trunk was left open, and then couldn’t get out.

Failure mode they hadn’t thought of yet

These and other kinds of, "I didn't think about it" scenarios are not being thought of, today, by Googlers.

Obvious but worth considering.

that would be way mo' scary to encounter than those passengers were expecting!

there are plenty of incidents of people getting in fights with their Uber driver, cab driver, etc (remember Anjali Ramkissoon the med student who had a little too much to drink?) but it seems like the "driverless automaton" world late at night might present a new set of weird expectations for awhile till practices and safeguards get ironed out.

here's the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsX8hNpaAOE

There is a 1369 Stevenson street problem in San Francisco for Waymo, and Waymo does not handle it well. There's a skate park there. It's ostensibly a two way road, but with parking, it's really not. So you have to drive into the sidewalk to let the other car pass. Until the Waymos can deal with that well, they're going to gridlock London.

For those that didn't watch the video, it's a hatchback not a sedan. So the "trunk" is a part of the passenger compartment.

Well, yea. Why else would you hire an ai taxi?

Look, we’re all trying to figure this out!