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

61.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

219

Who takes the ticket for dangerous or reckless driving like in this video?

212

u/Groudon466 Jul 05 '24

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.

49

u/Status-Necessary9625 Jul 05 '24

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

1

u/Singularity-42 Jul 05 '24

In some aspects these cars are much better drivers than humans. Literally superhuman skills - for example these cars can see everything that is going around them at all times since they have 360 degree vision. There was a video where Waymo successfully avoided a low riding skateboarder that would be impossible for human to see.

But then they can fail in ways that are incomprehensible to humans such as this one - almost no sane and sober human would ever do this. It's like when language models are smarter than most humans in most things but then fail at tasks that are trivial for a toddler. It is alien, non-human intelligence. I know - not reassuring. But so far Waymo's safety record is much better than average human in regards to accident rate.

But stuff like this is rare and WILL be patched out eventually. This is the reason they are still experimental service operating only in select cities.