This particularly protest is elegant because it's effective exactly to the extent that self-driving cars are not adaptable—it highlights the brittleness of the system by getting a substantial effect from a small nudge.
It was a political stunt by an aide to one of SF's supervisors. It did not arise organically from people upset about self driving cars. I don't think there was anything elegant about it. Just politics as usual in SF where the progressives battle the über-progressives over meaningless issues like re-naming schools while homeless people die on the street, the Tenderloin is an open sewer, and downtown withers away. It really hurts to see what has happened to my hometown over the past decade. I blame district elections and a weak mayor, both of which have contributed to a government that is incapable of doing much of anything. I suppose ultimately the voters are to blame.
Lol we're literally people living in SF upset about self driving cars. And the no the youth comissioner you're referring to is not some mastermind behind this, but we appreciate his political activism both with coning and with volunteering to be on the youth commission advisory board :)
Dubious. A human driver is also not going to take off with a cone on their hood. So fine, you need a human to take it off, what do you expect? The next problem after that is that the technician needs to reset the car's system... because it tries really hard to fail safe when something unexpected happens? And this is meant to be proof that they're dangerous?
Weird, unexpected things happen on the road every day. Are we seriously going to potentially risk gridlocking a city (not to mention our personal safety) for the gains of a small handful of private corporation as they test this black-box tech out against us?
I think it highlights how the system is tuned to safety over all other concerns. If there had been cones put on vehicles being driven by actual humans, you'd probably have had a few bad injuries or deaths.
> I think it highlights how the system is tuned to safety over all other concerns.
To be able to focus on something above all else, you first need to be able to unequivocally define what "it" is.
What is safety? It's not always the same thing, which is why the simplistic models of these cars fail to do the right thing in some edge cases where a human would know what to do.
Generally it seems they simply slow down and stop when confused. Which unarguably is very often the safest thing to do.
But then there are the examples where the car stops, blocking emergency vehicles. Clearly not the safe thing to do. Human drivers sometimes do things like drive up into the sidewalk to clear way for an ambulance in a tight spot. Driving onto a sidewalk is nearly always the worst possible thing, but sometimes the right thing to do. It's easy for human drivers to make this judgment.