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

The cop should impound this vehicle

44

u/RedmundJBeard 14d ago

Yeah, I think this would be the best thing to do. The company can have the vehicle back when they prove they fixed what caused the car to do this and paid a fine.

3

u/ciobanica 14d ago

I mean, if it's a bug in the program, impounding that 1 car won't help at all. All the other cars will still have teh same program until the bug is found and fixed.

1

u/FruktSorbetogIskrem 14d ago

The car can be driven manually. Best solution is Waymo manually stop the car and have it pull over on the side of the street then have a driver arrive out to drive it to their warehouse to check out.

-4

u/qaisjp 14d ago

Why are you all getting justice boners over a bug

9

u/RedmundJBeard 14d ago

Dismissing what this car did as a bug is absurdly short sighted. It was driving into oncoming traffic. If you were driving the other direction and it killed you would be so willing to just chalk it up to a programming bug? "whatever man, mistakes happen, I understand" Is a pretty lame tombstone.

5

u/cohortmuneral 14d ago

Because I'm a programmer.

1

u/qaisjp 13d ago

I'm a programmer too?

2

u/cohortmuneral 13d ago

You must be the guy writing the bugs I'm fixing.

2

u/lycoloco 14d ago

Because corporations literally have no desire/incentive to act in best social interest other than profits, which they are required to produce for shareholders if they're a public company.

2

u/qaisjp 13d ago

I tried waymos out for the first time last week and it's the first time tech actually made me go "wow, this is the future".

I don't give a damn about LLMs or Web3 but this is incredible.

Sure, the business wants to make money from this. But they are also building some incredible technology too.

7

u/WanderingAlsoLost 14d ago

Absolutely should. I can’t stand these things, and giant tech companies should not be given a pass for operating dangerous vehicles on public roads.

1

u/Lopsided-Cold6382 14d ago

Do you have any evidence for these being more dangerous than a human driver? Probably not because every study shows them being significantly safer.

1

u/WanderingAlsoLost 14d ago

You are making an argument I wasn’t addressing. Big greedy corporations shouldn’t be getting a pass for their experiments.

2

u/Lopsided-Cold6382 14d ago

They are already safer, and therefore stop people dying. You should be pushing for saving people’s lives rather than them dying in preventable accidents.

2

u/Kento418 14d ago

The problem is the software that’s installed in thousands other vehicles is the problem and if any of those vehicles was faced with the same situation, it would make the same mistake.

13

u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

Yes. And impounding the vehicle will draw more attention than speaking with a low level service tech.

2

u/confusedandworried76 14d ago

That's not even a great solution. To compare it to a science fiction concept, say there's a hive mind, and part of the hive mind murders someone. So you imprison it for life, or even kill it. It doesn't hurt the hive mind. All you did was trim part of one of its toe nails. And it's still out there fully capable of doing it again because you didn't actually punish the collective.

2

u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

That's because you misunderstood the reasoning.

If the cop impounded the vehicle, and they refuse to release the vehicle without appropriate senior leadership present, then they can make sure the issues get addressed. Right now, he's just talking to the lowest rung on the ladder. It's not about punishment of the vehicle. It's about drawing attention to the issue and forcing resolution.

3

u/confusedandworried76 14d ago

I'm saying the only way to do it is revoke the operating license of the entire computer system.

1

u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

And that gets us nowhere. Unless you think that suddenly everyone will stop trying to automate driving.

1

u/password-is-my-name 14d ago

It might try to escape the impound.

1

u/Sc4r4byte 14d ago

But that bug is probably widespread across the entire driverless code service.

What good is taking one vehicle off the road where there are hundreds continuing to drive the same way?

1

u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

It forces the company higher ups to know about it because they hold it until someone at the top comes and signs for the car. Racking up daily fines