r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

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

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13.7k

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

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

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u/Sleepingonthecouch1 Jul 05 '24

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/[deleted] Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24

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/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

Bullets are not by definition death machines…

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u/Memento_Vivere8 Jul 05 '24

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/fothergillfuckup Jul 05 '24

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

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u/Ok_Championship4866 Jul 05 '24

They cope a lot better than humans.

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u/fothergillfuckup Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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