San Francisco protestors are disabling autonomous vehicles using traffic cones (opens in new tab)

(techspot.com)

25 pointsductionist2y ago11 comments

11 comments

9 comments · 4 top-level

theamk2y ago· 3 in thread

Note the same thing will work with regular cars, too: if someone places a cone on my car, I surely won't drive until I remove it.

The only difference is that human driver can get out of the car, examinine a situation, and remove the cone. So I guess this makes self-driving cars an equivalent of human disabled/handicapped drivers?

willcipriano2y ago

I probably won't get out to remove a random cone. Great way to get car jacked.

alasarmas2y ago

I believe that you are saying the important thing here is that the driver of the vehicle lacks the ability to remove the cone from the vehicle. However, this is not accurate. The driver of an autonomous vehicle is not an algorithm, nor a computer. It is a corporate entity such as Cruise, Waymo, or Omni Consumer Products :-)

This corporate entity does have the ability to remove a cone from the vehicle. It just lacks a convenient agent to remove the cone, because that would require an additional expenditure that breaks the business model of profitably selling taxi rides without human taxi drivers.

It is not a crime to break a business model. Never has been, and with any luck, never will be.

theamk2y ago

No, the driver is the one pressing accelerator and brakes, and this is the computer in the car and algorithms in it.

Saying "driver is a corporate entity" makes as little sense as saying "driver of this regular bus is AC Transit".

It's like: imagine someone hates AC Transit, so they started approaching the busses and putting huge, obscuring stickers on the windshield. Would AC transit suffer from that? Sure. And so would the passengers and other vehicles on the road.

1 more reply

jrpt2y ago· 2 in thread

There’s a big difference between protest and vandalism. They are just Luddites.

Waymo’s safety record (desktop only): https://docalysis.com/files/hldxxn

kranke1552y ago

What about the implication these cars are sharing video with the police? That’s quite damning.

1 more reply

x86x872y ago

they're gonna have and even better safety record with those cones on them!

mutant_glofish2y ago

The first sparks of the Butlerian Jihad [1]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian...