[appplication]

I have seen this exact sentiment way too many times. The details of the accident don’t matter. It could be the fire department needing to get by to rescue an old lady’s cat from a tree. Yes, there is irony a human hit someone with a car. No, it is not material to the actual issue at hand.

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.