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Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

>What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.

I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.

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Not only that, but fine-tuning is cumulative. Test situations can be created and tested against forever. Lessons can be learned and applied across the whole fleet.

This is radically different from sharing the roads with a bunch of Sunday drivers, some of which might be distracted or impaired.

Yes, it totally makes sense for bike commuters to be run over and sent to the hospital by robotic driverless vehicles while billionaire entrepreneurs refine the AI models powering them — it’s a beta test after all, you can’t actually expect it to work on public streets. And I bet those cyclists weren’t even paying their road tax.

The needs of the 95th percentile that the model was tuned for outweigh the needs of everyone else, who can’t even afford a basic RWD Tesla Model 3 (which is pathetic and the most pedestrian of EV options since I drive an EV GM Hummer and I post on Hacker News)

How many cyclists are hit per million Uber rides?

I think that line of reasoning would only apply if the driverless vehicles are not better than human drivers. That is to say, it's perfectly reasonable that bike commuters would die as the software is improved as long as less bike commuters are die than would without the driverless cars.

To be clear, I don't know that I necessarily think that driverless cars currently are better than human drivers. I'm just pointing out that the logic changes if they are.

Logic and morality are on two separate paths. IF the driverless car decides to kill your daughter because saving a van full of refugees was for the greater good, then it wouldn't be a question of what was "better," it would be a question of what was "righteous." In this hypothetical scenario, logically it would make sense to kill your daughter and apparently you're completely comfortable with amoral constructs making this decision on your behalf.

Fortunately we don't have to ponder such philosophical dilemmas while the current iteration of so-called "driverless" vehicles are `developmentally delayed` to put it lightly. But I guess a few bruised-up bike commuters are considered "acceptable loss" along the way to real progess (which is surely coming soon, surely)

We get run over with or without driverless cars, but driverless cars do it an awful lot less and will keep getting better at it.

Then by that logic the software engineers should be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter when their beta test kills someone.

I don't follow your logic

I hope regulators watch video from the vehicle and think, “damn I would not have been able to react that fast. Sure we can make these things even safer but it would be immoral to block waymo’s operations as it would certainly increase harm.”

> damn I would not have been able to react that fast.

i apply my own standard of driving to it: I wouldn't get in that position in the first place.

I too dislike driving in SF.

It seems to me that the best metric might be whether the average driver would get into that position or react faster if they did.

I don't know if i'd ever feel good enough to get in an autonomous car if they were just a bit better than the average driver... the average driver is not great.

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