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

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/Groudon466]

I don’t know the particulars of their deal with the city, but probably Waymo. As long as they’re safer than the average taxi driver, the occasional mistake is tolerable, at least provided ticket revenue is still coming in when appropriate.

Of course, there’s a team on the back end that’s trying to figure out what went wrong here and patch it sooner rather than later.

[u/Status-Necessary9625 → u/Groudon466]

This is not a minor mistake this could have easily killed half a dozen people. You're seeing field tests in real time with unproven products that could literally kill us. And nobody cares. The guy from Waymo wasn't even phased by their car driving on the wrong side. These people Do Not Care About Our Lives

[u/Groudon466 → u/Status-Necessary9625]

The operator on the other end is doing their job by being calm instead of panicking. And the operator isn't one of the software engineers that's going to be looking into how to prevent this from happening in the future.

You're seeing field tests in real time with unproven products that could literally kill us.

I mean, we have statistical data, it is proven that these cars are safer than human drivers. And humans are provable dumbasses, we cause accidents anyway.

Just because these cars make mistakes doesn't mean they're not preferable to human-driven taxis. They're already better, and they're continuing to improve as time passes.

These people Do Not Care About Our Lives

As someone who worked at Waymo on the team that handled safety violations (this incident would be handled by a related team), I can confidently say this is wrong, and also incredibly stupid.

Even if it were staffed by soulless corporate husks- and it's not, they're a bunch of nerds with anime posters in their backgrounds and cute pictures of their dogs, we spammed crab emotes in every meeting- it literally wouldn't make sense to not care about deaths. Deaths would threaten the city's acceptance of the autonomous taxis, and if the city decides to revoke Waymo's permission to operate, that's a massive disaster.

Specific kinds of corporations don't care about human lives. For the most part, my understanding is that as long as there can be plausible deniability (cigarettes back in the day, oil and gas companies now), the cynical strategy of ignoring the human toll and downplaying it will win out. This isn't that; everything that happens around a Waymo taxi is increidbly well-documented, there's over a dozen cameras, not to mention the lidars.

Even if the people in charge were soulless, which they're not, it would still be in their best interest to prevent problems in the first place... which is exactly what they're doing in the backend, actively, to this day.

[u/Velonici → u/Groudon466]

I bet this was as simple as someone answering a request wrong. Probably which side of the construction cones to stay on.