[dmix]

> The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens inside a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's economy in return being the first to get the most training data.

[jessriedel]

That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

[calcifer]

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

[jrockway]

How is someone driving to work in their private vehicle public benefit? The roads are for driving on, nothing more, nothing less.

[pnutjam]

Not true, the roads are for the use and benefit of citizens.

[zodiac]

How about tax-paying non-citizen residents, tourists etc?

[falcolas]

They pay for their road use through gasoline and sales taxes.

[pnutjam]

Non-citizens and immigrants, even "illegal", benefit citizens.

[jessriedel]

Making normative suggestions in the middle of a news article is exactly the lack of integrity that I'm talking about. Rather than reporting the facts, the "journalist" is writing an opinion column without having the decency to label it as such. The validity of his opinions are irrelevant.

[rowanG077]

Self driving car technology has huge public benefit.

[tracker1]

If people aren't sharing the vehicle there's the same number of vehicles on the same number of roads, just less need for parking spaces.

Of course, the potential for reduced accidents should help. Unfortunately, part of why AZ was probably chosen is that it's mostly sunny/clear weather during the year.

[rowanG077]

Reduced accidents. Increased time for people using self driving cars. Companies no longer needing to pay for staff that pilots cars. Just the time and cost savings alone for private people and companies is hard to be overstated.

[tracker1]

Are the people driving really that much more expensive than the computers, tooling and infrastructure for automated cars? How do the maintenance costs compare? There's a lot more to it than just the drivers.

[dkarl]

Would you nationalize businesses that involved movement of people or goods, or would you privatize the roads and sidewalks? Otherwise I'm having a hard time imagining how goods would be delivered to stores, how raw materials would be delivered to factories, how bands would get to their paid gigs, and how I would get to work in the morning.

[decoyworker]

Isn't the whole point of public resources is that everyone can use them?

[Shivetya]

considering the later contributed to paying for the creation of the public resource and their use is not exclusive nor impedes others from using the same I see no issue.

[tvladeck]

Like when an individual drives to a store to get groceries?

[TulliusCicero]

How is this any different from taxis, truckers, etc.?

[xxxpupugo]

Are you suggesting all taxis companies being banned?

[navigatesol]

>It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

It's tiring reading commentators say things like this. Saying a professional journalist lacks "journalistic integrity" is bold. Why don't you step up and make this argument directly to the author, rather than being snide and posting it on a forum he will never read?

Here's his Twitter; have at it:

https://twitter.com/amir

[jessriedel]

1. I don't comment on Twitter.

2. I have confronted journalists whose practices I disagree with when I meet them in real life, and in general their excuses are not impressive. Most recently I challenged Ivan Semeniuk, science journalist for the Globe and Mail, when he visited Perimeter Institute for "The Future of Science Communication", a panel discussion we were both on. (Semeniuk was endorsing a different common journalistic practice I disagree with, not the same as exhibited by Amir Efrati, but I can't share because it was a private conversation.)

3. Challenging Efrati would be like confronting every panhandler who tells a false sob story. Newspapers are full of this sort of writing, and you could spend your life objecting to it.

[Barrin92]

because other drivers and pedestrians on public streets have a very strong interest in knowing how safely these cars perform and how they glitch out given that they could cause accidents at any point?

[JoeAltmaier]

How's that different from any human driver on Saturday night?

[Barrin92]

Human drivers know what to look out for in other human drivers, we don't know what to look out for in autonomous vehicles. If those vehicles perform particularly badly under some conditions that are not obvious the public would benefit from having transparent insight into how the cars function, so they can be appropriately alert.

A research experiment that exposes the public to additional risk should be performed with the maximum amount of transparency possible. It is frightening that this even needs to be spelled out.

[JoeAltmaier]

Human drivers have their own low-hanging fruit that can be pointed at for accident reduction. Tired, impaired, distracted driving are horribly commonplace.

Its a low bar, for automated cars to be better than human drivers. Sure they'll have their 'blind spots'. That's no condemnation of the whole industry. Because what we have now is not very good at all (fallible humans, all different). And when automated drivers have an issue we discover, they can all be fixed. Try that with humans.

[falcolas]

It’s a low bar for automated cars to be better than tired, impaired or distracted drivers. It’s a very high bar to be better than all drivers.

Even tired, impaired, or distracted drivers still behave in semi-predictable fashions - they tend to overreact.

[dmix]

That's why these vehicles have both a backup driver and workers monitoring remotely from the office...

No one is saying entirely driverless vehicles are ready yet. Even some of the earlier hawks who claimed next year have backtracked.

Nothing wrong with that, all software deadlines are usually 1.5-2x longer than initial optimistic estimates.

[Barrin92]

As the article lays out waymo has accurate data on where the cars glitch out. Take that data, put it onto a public map, make that available for resdients to browse so they have accurate, data driven insight into what they need to look out for when they encounter autonomous vechilces. There is absolutely no reason not to do this, the amount of effort is trivial, and it would enhance the safety of people living in those areas.

If waymo wants to have the privilege of secrecy they can run experiments somewhere not open to the public. That should be the standard we apply to these companies.

[JoeAltmaier]

But … we have Saturday Night human drivers, and we have no such rule for them. No complex system of reporting maps of bars and festivals and when to avoid them. Doesn't seem fair, somehow.

[jfoster]

You're spreading fud. Waymo have a lot of vehicles on the road and most of the time the human drivers run into the back of them while they're stopped. They haven't had any big incidents.

[IshKebab]

Yes! The public definitely has an interest in how dangerous other cars on public roads are. Imagine if the data showed that they'd had tons of near misses with cyclists for example.

[dmix]

That's not what the quote is talking about...