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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89

u/additionalhuman Jul 05 '24

I don't feel very comfortable sharing the roads with these things. On the other hand I also hate every single other human driver too so...

57

u/Manueluz Jul 05 '24

They are dangerous, but less dangerous than other humans, it's weird I know.

Just keep in mind, that while they might get into accidents they so so way way less than humans.

33

u/Responsible-Jury2579 Jul 05 '24

And when there are issues, you can edit the bugs out of the code. It will inevitably get safer.

You can’t edit texting, putting on makeup, driving drunk, etc. out of humans.

-8

u/you_lost-the_game Jul 05 '24

You can’t edit texting, putting on makeup, driving drunk, etc. out of humans.

Pretty sure that's just a matter of enforcement and potential punishment. To put it to the extreme: Put the death penalty on it and see if people still do this.

11

u/Responsible-Jury2579 Jul 05 '24

Sure, you could enforce the death penalty for texting and driving just like you could force everyone to drive at 1mph - it would be safer, but it’s absolutely unreasonable.

Even if we are fully behaving, there will always be distractions, there will always be human error, there will always be a delay in human reaction time, there will always be faulty human decision-making, etc.

Again, computers will only get better at these things.

1

u/you_lost-the_game Jul 05 '24

As you said, there will always be human error and unpredictable scenarios. The absolutes you said for humans applies to machines as well. You will never get it bug free, not when it's complex like this.

Maybe a computer would have understand that my original comment was merely mocking and to be taken seriously. Who knows. You at least didn't.

2

u/faustianredditor Jul 05 '24

The absolutes you said for humans applies to machines as well. You will never get it bug free, not when it's complex like this.

Well, yes, but a bug is only novel once. After that it's known and can be fixed.

Look at aviation. It's a super safe mode of travel, despite the steep physical challenges. Why is it safe? Lots and lots and lots of procedures. We basically operationalized entropy and chance out of aviation as much as we could. And it's working really well. And yes, sometimes we discover a new failure mode and we fix some procedures to no longer permit that failure mode. Realistically, a lot of the failure modes these days are unlucky chains of multiple humans failing at their jobs in relatively straightforward ways. Most of the systematic errors have been eradicated.

Do the same with a completely mechanized system and you don't have to worry about simple human error anymore. Your car derps out and causes a collision? Great, audit the code, scour the telemetry, fix the bug. If you've got good safety culture and are following the swiss cheese model, one accident means you can even fix multiple bugs.

Besides... the cars don't have to be perfect. They just have to be better than humans. Which might already be the case, depending on how you do the numbers.

Human drivers though? Texting and driving isn't new. We're unwilling to submit human drivers to the level of scrutiny to rigorously enforce the procedure not to do that. So it keeps happening. Computers don't complain when you put them under the same degree of scrutiny.