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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

I love this quote:

“People are lashing out justifiably," said Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist at City University of New York and author of the book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.” He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations of scabs — workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those on strike.

“There's a growing sense that the giant corporations honing driverless technologies do not have our best interests at heart,” Mr. Rushkoff said. “Just think about the humans inside these vehicles, who are essentially training the artificial intelligence that will replace them.”

Why is it that for every act of random vandalism or hooliganism, there's always an academic who will find a way to blame the victim?

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There's an important difference between blaming the victim and trying to explain why the attackers are doing what they are doing.

Rushkoff is doing the latter, not the former, and pretending he's doing the former certainly makes it easier to ignore his point.

He should not use the word "justifiably" if he's merely explaining.

Context suggests people are justifiably upset, not that these specific actions where justified. Google is putting their community at risk without any form of compensation. Much like dumping toxic waste into public streams it’s public harm for private gain.

PS: Never trust a quote that’s that short, it’s been stripped of all meaning.

Looking at the actual facts, there appear to be little justification for this violence, especially since it affects the human safety drivers the most and they are definitely not any kind of aggressor here.

Some recent quotes from the USA Today article covering the Waymo self-driving car hailing service:

“"But mostly it just makes me feel safe. One time, the Waymo (vehicle) paused before turning, and I wondered why. Then a car ran the red light and crashed into the median. It saw that car way before I did."”

“But the fact remains that after millions of miles of city driving, another 7 billion miles of virtual testing and countless more tests undertaken at a private faux-city facility in California, Waymo vehicles have yet to cause a major accident. When fender-benders do happen, often it's because human drivers bump into the robot cars.”

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/10/waymo-self-d...

The real issue is that we need more miles driven to really be certain that this safety record will hold. Thwarting this testing will probably endanger more people because the tech will become mainstream whether anyone likes it or not. It would be a lot better if the tech is over-tested than under-tested.

Yes. How many seconds per trip does Waymo's conservative driving cost? Probably not very many. Left turn delays, the main complaint, are a problem only at intersections with heavy traffic but no left turn signal. That can be dealt with partly by routing and partly by bugging municipalities for left turn signals at key points.

UPS drivers almost never turn left.[1]. It is both safer and more efficient to plan your route using almost only right turns.

I am sure Waymo knows this but I'd guess they don't want passengers to feel like the car is taking "crazy" routes. People could act in unpredictable ways if they felt the car was out of control and turning away from their destination.

In the long term, when people are more comfortable with the technology, I suspect they'll change this.

[1] https://theconversation.com/why-ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-a...

As your parent says: "Context suggests people are justifiably upset, not that these specific actions where justified. "

As in then being upset is justified, not their retaliation.

We are all entitled to our opinions. My opinion is that these vehicles are a lot safer than most human drivers and I do not see any justification for the vitriol displayed.

Think about it - running a car off the road so you can yell at them to display your displeasure? That’s violence and no one should be subjected to that.

Despite what people like to say, our institutions work and work a lot better than many around the world. If you want change, you have to work for it and convince others of your point. Democracy is not about acting out, it’s about civil discourse. All sides deserve to be heard, but in a civil manner.

> My opinion is that these vehicles are a lot safer than most human drivers

Eventually, that’s likely to be true, but currently these are sill in the experimental stage and regularly have issues. The collective benifit is probably a net win long term. But, they are not replacing google street view cars or something so as to spread that risk out. Instead they are concentrating that risk into a small subset of residential streets in some poor neighborhoods.

Even if it was already slightly safer than human drivers the extra traffic really risks these people’s lives. But because they are low income they don’t expect to be able to afford self driving cars in the next 10+ years. So, that’s meaningful harm without the exception to benifit.

Now how a tiny subset of a community responds is predictable but not justifiable.

> Instead they are concentrating that risk into a small subset of residential streets in some poor neighborhoods.

These cars already safer than human drivers and they are common on the streets around Google. So unless you mean "risk" as "risk of being slightly inconvenienced", neither of your points is accurate.

> But because they are low income they don’t expect to be able to afford self driving cars in the next 10+ years.

It is pretty clear that Waymo primarily intends to sell a taxi service, not cars directly. This taxi service would be cheaper and safer than any currently available so people of all incomes would benefit both directly and indirectly (fewer DUI drivers).

Taxi are expensive luxuries, poor people use busses.

Also, the last study I found had self driving car tests result in 4x the rate of injury’s vs normal drivers. This should be improving over time and the sample size was 11 injuries over 1.1 million miles, but even still systems in R&D are inherently risky.

Ride-Hailing Apps May Benefit Poor and Minority Communities The Most, Study Suggests.[1]

Waymo has caused a single crash in 5 million miles of driving and no one was hurt.[2] They have been involved in slightly more incidents than would be predicted for a human driver (30 vs. 21) in those 5 million miles but it was not at fault for the others.

[1] http://fortune.com/2018/06/30/uber-lyft-poor-minority-commun...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-crash-self-driving-google-...

First injury is more likely in residential areas. Tapping a car is less of an issue than tapping a pedestrian which are harder to detect and predict.

Second while the number is still a low enough number not to be particularly relevant other than to say the gross order of magnitude. However...

Google's autonomous vehicles have crashed 36 times in the Mountain View area

https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-waymo-apple-which-sel...

Waymo spokesperson called the research "deeply flawed" and said it "reflects a poor understanding of the data as it fails to distinguish between a vehicle that drives hundreds of miles per day on public roads, with one that seldom leaves its garage."

In other words they don’t disagree with the number of crashes, even when excluding other areas.

> First injury is more likely in residential areas.

I'm not sure what new argument you are attempting here. Mountain View has lots of heavily residential areas if you are implying otherwise.

The Waymo spokesman is completely right, this is a very stupid way of ranking safety. This article is more recent than the one I cited and includes more than twice the number of testing miles so the raw number of incidents is unsurprisingly higher.

> These cars already safer than human drivers

I have seen no such proof, source?

One must not implicitly attribute such things to context either, when there is not enough text to say so. Are all the reasons for being upset justifiable? Safety reasons probably are. Are Luddite reasons justifiable as well?

Luddite reasons are IMO understandable but not justifiable reasons to be upset.

My point was their was not enough context to say what the quote was about and you should treat such three word quotes as semantically meaningless “purple happy banana.” Still even ignoring the quote, safty is a legitimate issue.

The wording plainly states the lashing out itself is justifiable. That's very different from saying that being upset is justifiable.

It's absolutely not justifiable, because it's people taking the law in their own hand. If you disagree with how your city is being run, vote and participate. This is by definition bypassing the law and that's not what a civilized society does. If you call this justifiable, then due-process is right out of the window.

OK, I went to all the trouble of getting a free trial to NYT to read the article.

There's nothing there that changes my opinion.

> OK, I went to all the trouble of getting a free trial to NYT to read the article.

Sounds like the free trial served its purpose and let you see the type of content you'd potentially pay for.

You could just open it in reader view or in pocket/instapaper

It could also just be a poor choice of words, for which the charitable interpretation is that he's explaining.

Let's say, hypothetically, that he uses the word "understandably" instead. Would you consider that explaining or rationalizing? If you would consider that explaining, then maybe he just chose his adverb poorly. If you would consider that rationalizing, then I don't think there's a charitable framing of the point that you would accept as just explaining.

People here clearly disagree, which is fine. However, I'm seeing a lot of the unnecessary habit of discourse where people are trying to frame a disagreement as moral high/low ground.

Justifiably and understandably are two different things to me at least, the former implying like you said condoning in a moral sense.

>There's an important difference between blaming the victim and trying to explain why the attackers are doing what they are doing.

This is the quote

>“People are lashing out justifiably," said Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist at City University of New York and author of the book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.” He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations of scabs — workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those on strike.

He is quite plainly saying the vandalism is justified.

Also the “victim” here is, depending on your perspective, either a robot, or a multinational corporation with so little respect for privacy, taxation, and which has more money than sense, that sympathy is a non-starter. At most this is a write-off they can think of a natural tax they can’t avoid like all of financial taxes they tapdance around. I’m not seeing a possible entity to call a victim here, while the residents being used as guinea pigs actually are.

Wait -- Scientist kills innocent bystander with his experiment and the public shouldn't be mad about it? Would you have said the same thing if the professor defended Waymo?

Wait -- human kills innocent people with their distracted driving and the public shouldn't be mad about it?

Where are the people with rocks and knives and guns demanding human-driven cars be forced off the road due to the overwhelming number of people they have killed?

People are angry when distracted drivers kill, and when it happens people are forced off the road and in to jail. If reckless driving leading to manslaughter was not illegal, you might see a few angry mobs doing what you describe.

Yes but we're not talking about the driver/car/company combo that killed someone. That was a different driver, a different car, and a different company making the hardware/software. Forcing a Waymo car off the road and pointing a gun at the driver because an Uber car killed someone is not the same as what you're describing.

Generally speaking, people are not forced off the road and into jail when they kill others while operating motor vehicles, except in the most egregious cases.

It’s a running “joke” in some circles that if you want to kill someone and get away with the crime consequence-free, hitting them with your car and claiming it was an accident is the most reliable way to do it.

This would be like someone threatening you with violence and forcing you off the road because some other human driver killed someone. How is that reasonable?

When distracted or reckless drivers don't kill but just endanger, typically nothing happens, not even with video evidence.

> Where are the people with rocks and knives and guns demanding human-driven cars be forced off the road due to the overwhelming number of people they have killed?

If I were to guess, also in Arizona.

People in Arizona are using guns and knives to demand all human-driven cars get taken off the road because some of them kill people? I haven't read that news story.

I feel like this rapidly moves into Trolley Problem territory. 10,000+ people die in a year due to drunk driving, what's the acceptable death toll for rolling out driverless cars as fast as possible?

Because of the uncertainty behind something new, you should have strong evidence that driverless cars are substantially safer than cars with drivers.

Additionally, if driverless cars are being tested on public roads, you need laws and practices that are robust enough to prevent the kind of accident that killed someone. They had only one operator in the car, who was responsible for monitoring the car and logging information about its performance. They had specifically disabled safety systems which would have caused it to brake sooner.

Even if its expected that driverless cars will reduce fatalities due to drunk or distracted driving, you need to have sufficient evidence of the improvement, safety systems in place for test systems, and public discussion of the tradeoffs and what situations driverless cars might perform worse in than human drivers, because lots of people have behavioral expectations based on human drivers; things like making eye contact with a driver before crossing the street.

So yes, it is good to be working on and testing driverless cars, but you need to have a serious sense of humility and safety about it, and not push it, because even if you are incredibly safe you can expect some backlash, but if you miss the mark at all and oversell the safety, you'll get a lot more backlash, with justification, much sooner, which could set the whole program back significantly.

> you should have strong evidence that driverless cars are substantially safer than cars with drivers.

No. Considering the other benefits of self-driving cars, such as increased mobility for the elderly, you can at most require that they are as safe as cars with drivers, not necessarily safer.

If the benefits were great enough (reduced pollution indirectly saving lives? saved life-years due to more efficient traffic?) one could even accept that they could be a little less safe as far as direct fatalities are concerned.

I understand your point but I doubt it would work well in reality when it comes to public opinion/backlash.

Humans are disproportionately swayed by proximate causes, so deaths directly attributed to self driving cars are going to be more heavily weighted in the court of public opinion.

  increased mobility for the elderly

decreased, in fact. A self-driving vehicle can't go anywhere a cab or rideshare can't, while the latters have drivers who can assist loading/unloading elderly and their mobility aids.

Somebody with poor eyesight and slow reaction speed is an unsafe driver but doesn't need any particular help loading/unloading from a car. A driver who can help unload is a fine thing, but having somebody drive just so they can help unload seems like a ridiculous waste of resources. A car is ready whenever you need it; a car-and-driver might not be. And yes, you could schedule a car-and-driver to be available at a particular time...but you could similarly schedule somebody to be available to load/unload at the destination.

> If the benefits were great enough (reduced pollution indirectly saving lives? saved life-years due to more efficient traffic?) one could even accept that they could be a little less safe as far as direct fatalities are concerned.

I disagree. I'm finding it hard to come up with an example that would make me think it's ok to have more people hit and killed by cars. I'm more than ready for self-driving cars to be a reality, but not if more people will die. "Saved life-years" is not good enough.

What does it mean to avoid a fatality other than saving that person's remaining life-years?

> I'm finding it hard to come up with an example that would make me think it's ok to have more people hit and killed by cars.

Entirely speculative: Heart failure is the leading cause of death in the US. If 100% self-driving traffic could let EMTs arrive faster at the scene that could save more lives than a slight increase from traffic accidents.

Wouldn’t mandatory breathalyzer ignition locks solve this problem? This is a proven technology that shouldn’t kill anyone as it’s being rolled out. Move fast and break things is great for websites and apps, but when human lives are at stake it requires strict ethical considerations.

What about all the existing cars on the road? What about manual cars that can be push started? Who installs and certifies these, they need calibrated frequently, they are extremely simple to bypass for anyone with even basic vehicle knowledge.

If the law starts now, in 5-10 years the vast majority of old cars will be junked. Sure, there will still be a few old cars, but they will be an insignificant minority. It's not unlike how other rule introductions worked. Nobody banned old cars without seatbelts, they just required that all new cars have them.

Interlock breathalyzers have a host of problems that make indiscriminate application problematic. Additionally, judicial remedies can only be applied after someone has already been caught drunk driving. So even if we applied them to all prosecuted drunk drivers, it is not a complete prophylactic.

Self-driving cars have killed at least 3 people this calendar year despite there being several millions fewer self-driving vehicles on the road. Scale up those proportionate rates, they would be killing far more than 10,000 people a year.

So at this point, self-driving cars still have quite a bit of work to go to prove that they are actually safer than a drunk driver, let alone a sober driver.

If you think drunk drivers are bad, sober drivers kill more than twice as many people! The actual number to beat is something like 37,000 annually[0]. And I suspect your "millions" factor has an extra zero or two when you account for (a) miles driven (self-driving cars are probably more highly utilized) and (b) driving conditions (city is more interesting for training data than highway, whereas probably more person-driving is done on highways).

[0]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-announces-2017-r...

Your source doesn't differentiate between sober drivers and drivers not tested for any/all impairing chemicals.

Unknown sobriety != sober.

They should be mad about that. But that's not at all what this guy is complaining about.

Who has Waymo killed?

Uber killed the pedestrian, not Waymo. But that's hardly any comfort to the elected representatives of Arizona. I suppose the execution, management and oversight of the corporation really matter, but at this early stage of the industry it's hard to look at Uber's traffic fatality and interpret it as anything but negative for Waymo and the other driverless companies.

Wait, are you talking about the person that litterally stepped in front of a driverless car and was killed? Because I can’t see how that would’ve been any different with a human behind the wheel.

> act of random vandalism or hooliganism

I'm truly not sure if you're insidiously doing this on purpose, but that seems to be an understatement and mischaracterization of what's going on here. These are targeted acts, more akin to civil disobedience than vandalism. The way you phrase it seems like you're trying to plant a seed that distracts from the point.

I try to assume positive intent, but this really seems like a spin job. Could you perhaps elaborate?

Definition of vandalism: willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property.

It's vandalism.

Nobody disagrees that it is vandalism. The darkerside's comment was clearly referring to the characterization of these incidents as:

> act of random vandalism or hooliganism

darkerside correctly corrects that:

> These are targeted acts

That should be obvious to anybody that read the article, which contained several statements form the people involved explaining why they vandalized the cars. Calling it "random" acts of vandalism is an extreme misrepresentation of what happened. The vandalism was done for clearly stated reasons.

I am not a lawyer but I would think that if the cars are moving in traffic during the criminal act I suspect that the criminals would get a higher charge (criminal endangerment?)

More akin to hate crime, really.

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