Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/21/waymo-recalls-entire-fleet-after-one-hits-utility-pole.html
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This decision must make any remaining “effective altruists” very sad.
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“They have a technology which is amazingly safe, but it’s not perfect, which means that we’re still finding these incidents where the cars do things that aren’t expected,”
A favorite bit of somewhat sleight-o-hand statistics is to divide the number of robot car accidents by all car accidents and thereby conclude that they’re “amazingly safe”. Perhaps notable, using that statistic, that they’d still be judged “amazingly safe” if every robot car were involved in an accident - as there are currently so relatively few robot cars. An additional statistic of robot car accidents per robot car would be a bit more enlightening
(“Well we didn’t expect it’d do …that!” Ah, so more testing on human populated streets, eh?)
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“…a wooden utility pole trying to perform a low-speed pullover maneuver…”
Are we sure the pole wasn’t at fault?
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Update: Heroic utility pole pulls PIT maneuver on rampaging Waymo car, says its what any conscientious utility pole would do…
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You never know, they might go the other direction. If you want to maximize safety, you should hold humans to the same standard. Any time a human causes a collision, they immediately get their license revoked, whoever taught them to drive has to have their curriculum reviewed, and all driving tests are suspended until they add questions and skills that, if applied, would have prevented that particular type of accident.
In all seriousness, though, it is good the way we’re holding driverless cars to a higher standard than human drivers. Not just for PR, but because they ought to be able to do dramatically better. They don’t require the messy, kludgy compromises we make for humans because of the needs of society competing with the limitations of our brains and bodies.
Ultimately, as the tech rolls out more broadly, the proof will come out in actuarial tables. You can’t fool the insurance companies for long.
… and are we sure it was really a pole and not just a “pole-like permanent object” 
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Cowards! Mobilize the entire Waymo fleet to pound that utility pole into submission!
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…where recall is a patch, instead of drilling all the cars on a series of exercises (lots of paid people pretending to be other Waymos (like, holding blinds,) going the other way in a misting tent, gal driving up to the wrong-way car and gesturing commands, cone attacks?) Is there to be no ‘screw all your rules, that’s my reward function’ external lamp?
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