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by smallmancontrov 364 days ago
Here's a human doing the same thing in the same video for the same reason: https://youtu.be/_s-h0YXtF0c?t=906
2 comments

They shouldn't be on the road either. That's not a positive argument for the Tesla experience, it's a negative one for whoever was driving that car.
I don't like what that person did, but I don't think their license should be taken away for it.
I believe that driving is a privilege, not a right.

However, I'm not saying that their licence should be taken away (we've all made mistakes - I should have made that clear), but if that is representative, it is dangerous. I rode motorbikes for many years, and you can spot people who are dangerous very quickly from their 'car body language'. And an error like that in another circumstance could kill someone.

I knew people whose driving had deteriorated like this (my late mother and her friends spring to mind). They refused to accept they were not capable any more, and she used to do things that terrified me. I had discussions (kindly!) about her driving standards and errors and she refused to accept that she was making the errors she was. And they were not as bad as what I saw in the video.

And so it’s ok to break traffic rules? In my country, as a human this will get you easily a one month license suspension.
No, just a bit of perspective. I'm sure the video record of your car would be squeaky clean with no violations whatsoever.
If I said I've never had a driver's licence, can we get back to the topic at hand?

What's the thesis here, humans are imperfect drivers and therefore we should accept self driving cars driving into incoming traffic, and if anyone objects, focus on their faults instead?

We allow imperfect humans, we should allow similarly imperfect robots. The robots will get better. The humans, in aggregate, will not.
Humans on the aggregate can definitely get better, that's why Norway has 2.14 / 100k traffic-related deaths per year and the United States has 12.84 / 100k.
Norwegians drive half as much. Even if we ignore the other components of the gap, closing that 50% will require rebuilding 300000 square km of urban sprawl into dense urban centers with good public transit. It's a nice thought, but my money is on the robots.
It's not a binary. That particular case is pretty egregious since the car signals to turn, gets into the turn lane, actually starts turning, and then swerves back (across the oncoming traffic lanes in the middle of an intersection!) and tries to get back into the correct lane to drive straight, but only manages to achieve that after driving for a bit in the lane for oncoming traffic. That is a major fuckup. And this all happens on a road with fresh clear marking, on a sunny day with perfect visibility.