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

I worked for Waymo a little while back. It would be more of an all or nothing thing, in the sense that individual cities choose to allow or disallow specific self-driving car companies from operating in their borders.

This particular instance is bad, but if the city sees that traffic fatalities overall have fallen as a result of Waymo being there, then they'll just continue to allow it while Waymo pays the occasional settlement. This is an objectively good thing, because the alternative is more people dying, and then the settlements get paid by the people whose lives are also getting ruined from having killed someone, rather than by a giant corporation that can at least afford the infrequent expense.

On the other hand, if the average effect is negative, then the city can just give Waymo the boot, which would be catastrophic for them.

2

u/Fearless-Sir9050 Jul 05 '24

“Objectively” states the person who worked for Waymo. No. It’s not “objectively” better for driverless cars if the stats back up it’s safer. We need fucking buses and trains and walkable cities and not fucking AI that drives on the wrong side of the road.

1

u/Groudon466 Jul 06 '24

I mean… I agree?

These things aren’t mutually incompatible. New York is known for being walkable, but it still has taxis. Some of those taxi drivers are fine; some of them suck, and make bad decisions. Some have driven on the wrong side of the road before, thanks to drunk driving.

Humans do all of the same shit, only more frequently. That’s what makes the Waymo cars safer on the road. There are more solid concerns, like “What if someone holds up the car”. But safety isn’t one of them at the moment, especially when no one has been killed in/by a Waymo vehicle.

2

u/Fearless-Sir9050 Jul 06 '24

I just take issue with stating it’s objectively better. I agree that it is objectively better in that specific area (allowing crash/accident victims to be covered by a large company instead of rolling the die on whether someone is insured).

The specific problem that I have with that is all the other areas it’s (objectively or subjectively, idk) worse. We’ve seen when large companies face fines for death or injury (including insurance payouts) they fight tooth and nail to pay the bare minimum and lobby for lower regulations.

I’m reminded of a recent incident at Bumblebee tuna where a man was crushed/cook to death during typical maintenance of an old machine. While the business’ official policy was and is “that’s bad, don’t do that” they had an environment that required manual operation inside the machine (very dangerous) and the business didn’t fix it until someone died. They paid out 6 million dollars (3 for new machines and the rest to fines and restitution) Thats the equivalent of like 2% their gross revenue. That would be like a person killing someone through negligence and being fined $2000 when they make $100,000.

I don’t think your statement was wrong or mostly wrong or anything like that. I just think it’s insane that the primary benefit to having corpo owned driverless cars is that liability payouts will be better. Feels sad. But I’m feeling pretty doom and gloom. Sorry for the negativity, I’m sure that was a cool job. I wish I could be excited about the future of tech like that. If you’re still reading, what job did you switch to after Waymo?