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by sagarm
1017 days ago
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So much discussion about whether Cruise slightly delayed the ambulance from leaving the scene. Hardly any discussion of the fact that it was a human driver that ran over the pedestrian, "critically injuring" (brutally crushing parts of their body, so they bled out after the driver fled I assume) them in the first place. Was the driver charged? Did the street design contribute? Nobody cares, because apparently a few dozen San Franciscans' lives per year are a worthwhile sacrifice to save suburbanites a few minutes on their commute. |
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The real problem is that tech companies are moving faster than infrastructure and governance can keep up. This is a mark of hubris that, if unchecked, will ultimately result in self-inflicted knee jerk regulations that have the potential to all but cripple to the self-driving car industry.
I don’t agree that self-driving cars need to be regulated into the ground because of little mishaps like this. It doesn’t upset me much that there was a mistake. But what is significantly more distressing is the general impression that these companies don’t give a fuck about taking responsibility for this. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all to say “you fucked this up, your fleet is grounded until our investigation is over and you can prove safeguards have been put into place to prevent this from happening again”.
To the above point about treating this like plane crashes etc, the NTSB doesn’t skip out on analysis because of the actual impact, it considers what is the possible impacts of something going wrong. So if your jet engine blows up mid flight but you still manage to safely land, they treat that with the same due process as if it killed a plane full of people. The same applies to these self-driving car companies, and why it’s such s ridiculous distraction to even bring up what business the ambulance had to why. It doesn’t matter. These cars need to yield. And until they can they need to be immediately pulled from the roads.