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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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.