"Thankfully, the vehicle was not transporting any passengers at the time of the blaze, and Waymo is no longer required to have a safety driver in each of its vehicles."
No, Jalopnik:
It is precisely the zero occupation of the car that brought on the attack.
Also, a real person would have steered the car around that crowd.
It is no accident that Rebecca Solnit's anti-paean to Big Tech and tech bro culture starts with a consideration of "self-driving" cars. It goes on to sketch a picture of where the growing resistance comes from.
The Bay Area was "a laboratory for new ideas. We’re still that lab, but we’re no longer an edge; we’re a global power centre, and what issues from here – including a new super-elite – shapes the world in increasingly disturbing ways."
@CelloMomOnCars I was recently chatting on FB with a friend who regularly takes Waymos around SF. She says her experiences are great, and expects the tech to keep improving. I asked her to consider if it's already peaked since it can't predict human behavior, and instead humans would keep getting pushed out of public spaces by corporations, like with jaywalking laws. Thanks for giving me the perfect example!
And good on the partiers for gleefully neutralizing the threat to their safety and fun!
@CelloMomOnCars This is a Waymo design failure - this road should have been treated as blocked, just like a road blocked by a construction or a fallen tree.
But it's very hard to use local sensor information to tell the difference between "crowd of people who are on the street as their destination" (e.g. celebration, protest) and "river of people temporarily blocking traffic" (e.g. when an event lets out) - and in the latter case the car is there to help reduce the crowd.
@CelloMomOnCars@robotistry the car takes up more space than the people who might fit inside it, so in what way does it help reduce the crowd by attempting to occupy the same space as it?
You want it there (or at least in the vicinity rather than avoiding the area entirely) because its job is to collect people (ideally from the fringes of the crowd) and take them home, thereby reducing the overall size of the crowd.
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