A driverless car in San Francisco drove right into wet concrete and got stuck after seemingly mistaking it for a regular road: 'It ain't got a brain'
www.businessinsider.com
The site had been marked off with construction cones and workers stood with flags at each end of the block, according to city officials.

A driverless car in San Francisco drove right into wet concrete and got stuck after seemingly mistaking it for a regular road: ‘It ain’t got a brain’ / The site had been marked off with constructio…::The site had been marked off with construction cones and workers stood with flags at each end of the block, according to city officials.

  • meco03211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    Every time one of these things happens, there’s always comments here about how humans do these things too. Two responses to that:

    First, human drivers are actually really good at driving. Here’s Cory Doctorow explaining this point:

    Just saying “humans are good” is a flat statement with no impact. They would need to be better than self driving cars for that to mean anything. The reason this is always pointed out when news pops up of a self driving car having an accident like this, is because those stories don’t make headlines for someone like you to use as an anecdote.

    There’s like a few hundred robot taxis driving relatively few miles, and the problems are constant.

    This is where you didn’t normalize to miles. Amplified by the next sentence…

    I don’t know of anyone who has plugged the numbers yet, but I suspect they look pretty bad by comparison.

    You don’t know the numbers. You just feel strongly about it. That’s not evidence.

    • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Like I said, everything is normalized by miles or discussed inbthe context of distance driven.

      We don’t have concrete numbers for the real world cars, but we absolutely have enough to make educated estimates, and those line up with the existing data.

      In a few months, the cars had some 55 incidents with emergency services. iirc there were only a couple hundred cars. There are millions upon millions of cars in San Francisco driving orders of magnitude more miles than that, and the emergency services personnel are actively flagging the self driving cars as a serious problem.

      I’d obviously prefer to have better real world data. The data that we do have is consistent in showing self driving cars significantly underperform compared to humans per mile driven by several orders of magnitude, as Doctorow mentioned in that piece, and I quoted. That data that does exist is also consistent with the emerging picture, albeit the numbers for that aren’t in yet.

      Afaik, there isn’t a single piece of data in existence in favor of self driving cars, but there is plenty against. If you have something to the contrary, lmk, because that would greatly change my opinion. I fucking want a self driving car. They sound rad as hell. But I don’t want to organize our entire society around more big tech vaporware.