Tragic about the cat - and Waymo must improve - but we cannot lose sight of the greater good.
I can't find anything saying waymo has a thermal camera. They aren't expensive- certainly not compared to the LIDAR- and provide extremely discriminated input on "am I about to kill something?" They're not perfect as foul weather and fog are likely to blind thermal- but they shouldn't be driving in suboptimal conditions until they have a track record of safety in optimal ones.
Waymo has experimented with thermal imaging in the past. I've never seen experiments indicating it's a particularly valuable modality for AVs, and high resolution thermal cameras exceed the price of decent LIDAR these days. You can easily spend $10k+ on a FLIR sensor with a pixel count higher than 4 digits.
Sounds good? It’s exactly working as it should.
You imply all human driving is like that one example which is the worse one can come up with, which is not true.
You imply Waymos on the street will take the 20 year old irrational driver out of the road, which is also not true.
And "I did bad but others do worse" is a terrible premise to live by.
If Waymo cars are statistically safer than normal cars then it is fine. What is your alternative?
Edit: you could have an issue with the statistical power itself
In the U.S., billions of dollars that could be spent on proven ways of solving the problem are instead spend on speculative robotic car development.
Robotic cars are not the only solution. They may eventually be as effective as proven solutions that are offensive to U.S. car supremacists, but as of today, robotic cars have proven only to be better than untrained, inattentive U.S. drivers and the life-threatening domestic policies that enable them. Robotic cars aren’t trying to solve the problem; they’re trying to capture spending on the problem. If transportation policy magically changed overnight to force immediate, funded implementation of proven safety processes from other countries, the excuses given for Waymo and others to beta-test their “these fatalities are a necessary accident in service of zero deaths” robotic vehicles would no longer hold water.
Transit changes are not required to implement the safety changes made by other countries. The cause and effect is reversed here: safety changes make transit more appealing because safety changes tend to decrease peak vehicle capacity, but transit does not make safety more appealing to untrained and overconfident (or willfully unsafe) drivers. You can’t just focus on transit while ignoring drivers and expect people to stop dying.
I remember during the first days of Covid lockdown how 99% of the cars on the busy hill outside my apartment were replaced by transit, with a commute distance of zero miles. The people who liked to do downhill racing on that hill during the day sped up from their usual brake-screech limits of 40mph to as high as 70mph, in a 35mph residential with an unsignaled busy crosswalk. And they continued doing this until the end of the lockdown when other cars got in their way again. Transit might reduce total car volume but it would increase the mean kill rate per roadway vehicle without safety culture and spending shifts.
The greater good is not served by allowing profit-making machines to use public infrastructure to test lethal machines in.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Easy, most people fit that description actually. And that's fortunate because otherwise the world would collapse pretty quickly from lack of midwifes and gynecologists.
In fact, the neoliberal cult that neglects the human nature and pretends everything is shaped by monetary incentives is slowly destroying our societies…
I'm pretty positive that very few of the women you know do prostitute themselves for a living despite it being the most profitable activity imaginable. Turns out most women aren't profit-seeking after all.
It is served when the state runs anti-DUI ads and puts up billboards reminding people to sleep when they they're tired?
It's served when car accidents are either the #1 or #2 killer of children?
I'm not sure I trust you to decide what's best for society.