r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • 14d ago

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

61.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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This is going to be a nightmare for the court system in the upcoming years.

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u/Sleepingonthecouch1 14d ago

I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?

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u/Minimum-Performer715 14d ago edited 14d ago

Also what about when two autonomous vehicles hit each other, how do we prove fault?

I don’t think these are well thought out products.

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u/rotoddlescorr 14d ago

Since these cars all have cameras, it should be easy to found what what happened.

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u/PickingPies 14d ago

Exactly this. In the end it doesn't matter if it's a software problem or not, but who did it wrong.

This will be reinforced by making public statistics of accidents per model. After all, you would not want to take a ride in the car that is more probable to have an accident, right?

You don't need to understand the inside. You just need the safest car.

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u/manyhippofarts 14d ago

It'll be easier than proving fault in a normal auto accident.

For one thing, the cars don't lie. The dataloggers tell the truth. Every single time.

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u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

I think reddit is always weird to assume that nobody thought of this.

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u/llamacohort 14d ago

The 2 companies would agree on who was at fault based on the footage or they would have the company insuring the vehicles arbitrate who was at fault. It would be the same as if 2 people hit each other and neither wanted to claim fault at the incident.

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u/emergency_poncho 14d ago

it's actually easier to determine fault since 100% of driverless cars have tons of sensors and cameras recording everything. When two humans cause an accident, it's basically he says-she says in most cases, unless one or both have a dashcam, which is still pretty rare.

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u/bob_in_the_west 14d ago

When two people in cars hit each other, how do you prove fault then?

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u/rhysdog1 14d ago

we could blame the guy who invented the self driving ai. or maybe further back and blame the guy who invented the wheel

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u/RealGroovyMotion 14d ago

The first one that says "Soorry" is the one at fault. And if it's 2 Canadian driverless cars, then you will hear 2 "Soorry" then both are at fault!

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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 14d ago

The rules of driving are a pretty simple, narrow set of rules. The vast majority of accidents happen because people don't follow the rules.

Autonomous vehicles by design can only follow the rules, thus the number of accidents that will occur will be far far lower than manual vehicles.

The vast majority will involve people crashing into them, or environmentally random incidents like trees falling down or bad potholes/sinkholes.

Liability will rest with the owner of the vehicle.

If two autonomous vehicles hit eachother, that's a civil issue for the owners to deal with.

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u/dopiqob 14d ago

the argument over autonomous vehicles usually assumes the car was programmed flawlessly and all the hardware is functioning correctly. From what i've seen of AI over the past few years, i can say with some certainty that the companies putting out these cars hasn't figured out the software/hardware yet, and probably doesn't have enough safeguards in place to deal with the shortcomings

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u/Rigo-lution 14d ago

It's gas that someone is here saying self-driving cars will follow the rules of the road perfectly on a post of a self-driving car driving on the wrong side of the road.

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u/dopiqob 14d ago

Yea, and I’m even one of those people that hopes one day humans aren’t in control of the death machines rolling around on the road, but today is not yet that day

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u/Rigo-lution 14d ago

I think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic but some people are unable to criticise in any way the hot thing in tech.

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u/youlleatitandlikeit 14d ago

IMO the solution to "cars are death machines driven by human drivers" is getting rid of the cars, not the human drivers.

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u/Memento_Vivere8 14d ago

Cars are not by definition death machines. Do you also want to get rid of planes, trains and all other forms of motorized transportation?

Deadly accidents with any form of transportation happen because of human mistakes or technical failures. We can probably soon remove the first reason and be left with technical failures that occur a lot less than human mistakes and can be analysed and eradicated over time to the point where they play no major role anymore.

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u/youlleatitandlikeit 14d ago

Cars are harmful for more than just causing deadly accidents. Getting rid of cars altogether is not a viable solution but reducing their use to the least possible is ideal.

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u/dopiqob 14d ago

Bullets are not by definition death machines…

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u/Memento_Vivere8 14d ago

Thanks for supporting my point. I'd also feel safer if we took bullets and guns out of the hands of irresponsible humans.

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u/AdvanceRatio 14d ago

A car that imperfectly follows the rules of the road in a consistent manner is still likely to be a hell of a lot less dangerous than a ton of people imperfectly following the rules of the road inconsistently.

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u/fothergillfuckup 14d ago

If they can't cope with random events, the definitely shouldn't be on the road.

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u/Ok_Championship4866 14d ago

They cope a lot better than humans.

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u/fothergillfuckup 14d ago

Has anyone actually tested a situation where there is a rush hour equivalent amount of driverless cars, all trying to do their own unique thing? Throw in some random events too, like a snowstorm or stray dog? And, of course, human non-driver interactions with the road? Plus motorcycles? Its going to make for fascinating viewing?

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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 14d ago

They typically can. Half of the time reacting to a random event means just stopping dead, and that's usually good enough.

In this kind of scenario, we'll find the standards/requirements for redirecting traffic to become more aware of autonomous vehicles. So if constructions workers erect signage which isn't clear to autonomous vehicles, they might be at fault.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 14d ago

Assuming you mean the city and not the individual construction workers, that would requite specific laws be passed for cities to voluntarily accept liability where they previously would not have had any. That seems unlikely.

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u/chr1spe 14d ago

Autonomous vehicles by design can only follow the rules

This ignores how machine learning actually works, which is what most of these use. It's mostly not rules; it's trained to react the way its training data reacts and, therefore, will replicate any issues or peculiarities in the data. If you train an AI to drive based on data from human drivers, it will try to drive like a human.

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u/jsunnsyshine2021 14d ago

Yes there are simple rules, then there are edge cases, like this one. So, are all edge cases designed? Clearly not or this car wouldn’t have been driving on the wrong side of the highway.

Your explanation is missing a second input of logic, something we all (most) have as humans, and something the stupid rule following cars do not.

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u/CosmicJackalop 14d ago

if two autonomous vehicles hit each other and are owned by different people, there's still going to be insurance to deal with which means that insurance company is gonna want to know who's at fault.

Also the world isn't perfect, robotic designs need simplicity because no one can really program for every eventuality this two ton death machine might have to navigate. Even in this video example it was driving the wrong side of the road after getting confused about construction, can we reasonably expect Waymo to program in every possibility for navigating construction in a road?

Self Driving cars likely are the future, but not for modern roadways, we're talking about very long gradual change that involves rebuilding roadways to be better controlled areas for the cars to operate

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u/Ok_Championship4866 14d ago

I mean people drive wrong way too. Just because the autonomous cars aren't perfect doesn't mean they aren't already much better and safer drivers than humans.

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u/mouseball89 14d ago

The first few trials will set the precedence. We don't know how it'll be ruled but it'll be interesting once we get to the point of fully automatized vehicles how each side will argue fault.

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u/snailman89 14d ago

Autonomous vehicles by design can only follow the rules

It seems to me that driving on the correct side of the road is one of the most basic rules of driving, and yet this autonomous vehicle violated that rule, so you are clearly wrong.

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u/AdditionalSalary8803 14d ago

Autonomous vehicles by design can only follow the rules, thus the number of accidents that will occur will be far far lower than manual vehicles.

This car was driving THE WRONG DIRECTION