Safe Streets Rebel’s protest comes after automatic vehicles were blamed for incidents including crashing into a bus and running over a dog. City officials in June said…

  • Billiam@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    City officials in June said there have been ninety incidents involving Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise vehicles since January.

    Compared to how many traffic incidents involving human-operated vehicles? Because if that number is greater than 90, the AVs are the safer choice.

    Automated cars don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be better than people.

    • CaptFeather@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      To play devil’s advocate, how many AVs are on the road everyday? There are millions of cars on the road so naturally there are going to be a ton of accidents.

    • CoderKat@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      The comparison needs to be normalized for distance driven. There’s far more human driven cars. But most humans don’t spend that long driving (I’m not sure how much of the day is spent driving by these AI cars, but they theoretically could drive all day long).

      The quota also does say “involving”, which may include accidents where someone else hits an AI driven car. If so, that’s highly misleading.

    • Shazbot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Bay Area native here. They’re also prone to dead stopping in the middle of the street and other moving violations, blocking emergency services and public transit in addition to normal traffic. Ideally, we’d like these vehicles to be held accountable for these violations like normal drivers: fines, suspensions, impounds. But we’ll settle for a human driver on standby who can immediately override the software when a moving violation occurs.

    • wimpysocks@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Compared to how many traffic incidents involving human-operated vehicles? Because if that number is greater than 90, the AVs are the safer choice.

      Well that is simply flawed logic. How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.

      • Billiam@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.

        I think you meant less.

        Ideally, you’d be correct and we should be looking at per capita incidents- like how many incidents per 100 miles on the road or something. But the article just cited a flat number of incidents without contextualizing, which as you’ve pointed out can be misleading. Without knowing the ratio of AVs to human-driven vehicles, the best rebuttal that could be offered is “Yeah, but how do those 90 incidents compare to how people drive?”

    • Qazwsxedcrfv000@lemmy.unknownsys.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      And they will definitely be better than people. Just them being able to communicate with each other, even locally, can remove the need for traffic lights already.

      • firadin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        What percent uptime does your phone’s wifi/bluetooth/mobile internet have? Is it exactly 100%?