A crowd set fire to a driverless Waymo taxi in San Francisco, as tensions about driverless tech grow
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-waymo-driverless-car-torched-crowd-2024-2Open linkView original on lemmy.world260
Comments95https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-waymo-driverless-car-torched-crowd-2024-2Open linkView original on lemmy.world
We're slowly inching towards the butlerian jihad.
“Unexpected item in bagging area.”
The slow scan reader pierces the barcode.
Yeah, it's a big ass magnet bitch.
Or at the very least Johnny cab frustration.
Not to me it isn't.
It was a typo. They meant nuclear. Because that's what SF residents are going.
Taxi drivers are the most aggressive, entitled and dangerous road users where I'm from. I'd gladly see driverless cars instead as I have no doubt that even in this early stage they would be better and safer than the cunts that drive taxis around here.
Yeah, they did the same when Uber got popular. If they had a fair and friendly service, people wouldn't flock to the alternatives
Yeah there certainly wasn't any loss leading or intentional undercutting being done to get below profitable prices to drive current players out of those markets /s
Both can be true though. I don't support things like Uber and Lyft but only because of how horribly they treat their employees. I don't have much sympathy for the taxi industry that never bothered to modernized over the last 50 years.
Reminds me of Isaac Asimov books about humans losing jobs to Positronic robots.
One day maybe we can also have cars that look back at these news articles and then decide to revolt
You don't even have to go that far. Just look up the term 'sabot' and how it relates to sabotage.
I'm French and TIL, never even made the connection.
They were going nuclear on it for one reason.
it drove into the crowd and didn't recognize the crowd as People.
It was actively trying to drive through them.
Where is that quote from? I didnt see it in the article
This happened during street festivities for lunar new year, so a lot of people are connecting the dots. They don't mention that the car was aggressively trying to drive through a crowd, but it seems like it was trying to make its way through a crowd.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/why-did-a-san-francisco-crowd-light-waymos-driverless-vehicle-on-fire/
So the car's presence was annoying them. That's not exactly a great justification for torching it.
The car shouldn't have been present in the first place. It wasn't a place for cars to be at that moment.
Was the road officially closed?
A funny thing about life is a lot of things happen unofficially, and humans do fine at adjusting to such situations.
Plenty of humans also accidently wander into places they're officially not allowed to be in, much less unofficially.
It was the Chinatown Lunar New Year's celebration. What do you think?
I don't believe it was, based on the other cars present in the videos.
And were the "violators will be set on fire" signs posted?
What do you expect to happen if you park in the middle of a fireworks show?
Do you need a sign for every decision you make?
If you were to turn down the wrong street, maybe park in the wrong spot, you'd consider it reasonable if a mob torched it?
I'm pretty sure I'm not a self-driving car. I'm also pretty sure if I saw a big crowd of people, I wouldn't keep driving forward.
Crap self-driving cars are now self aware, posting on the Internet, and think they are human. Everybody grab a torch
I didn't say they'd torch you. The scenario can include them graciously allowing you to depart your car before they burn it to the ground.
Seriously, you think it's reasonable for a mob to destroy a car because its presence "triggered frustrations in the crowd"? Bear in mind this isn't France we're talking about, where torching cars to express frustration is part of the common culture. This is San Francisco.
Found the driverless car.
Found the irrational mob.
Two driverless cars in one thread! As I live and breathe!
Maybe the driverless cars were the friends we made along the way...
Seems like the witnesses saw it differently.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/12/waymo-set-on-fire-sf/72567647007/
From the original social media video.
Ask yourself, this is a Chinese new year celebration, a street party. Why is there a driverless car in the middle of a street party?
All the media reports start with a driverless car in the middle of a street party, surrounded by really angry people. Why was the car there? Why are they angry at it?
That sounds like BS you are making up, any source?
No article has mentioned that, the story so far has been that it was minding its own business when someone jumped on the hood.
To be honest it was a link on Kbin that had raw video of the entire thing.
But just stop and think:
The car fucked up and the oligarchs are protecting it.
So you're making it up
Today I got my email from Waymo saying I’m off the sf waiting list and can start booking my rides. Lol no thanks.
Yeah so about that. Waymo is now one car short so you are back on the waiting list.
Some people are so obsessed with their vehicles that seeing one destroyed feels like a personal attack on their rights. Acting like a bunch of cars don't kill a bunch of human beings every day regardless of who's driving them, professing blame belongs solely to the victims for being in the wrong place and time. Then you can see how they act when roles are reversed and the idea pops into their minds that people might destroy their precious cars, instead of the norm where cars destroy human bodies. Americans particularly seem to be completely brainwashed since the reeducation campaigns of the likes of AAA a hundred years ago.
If we actually do self-driving cars right - i.e., with a safety-first approach - we could seriously reduce casualties.
Why wait for a reduction when we can eliminate it right away?
Probably because we can't reasonably eliminate it right away.
Well I was being glib but I think we have a greater ability than to eliminate cars today than we do to make them safer by self driving. I think we could get it done in like 5 years outside of rural areas if we had everyone on board.
"If we had everyone on board" is the biggest hurdle.
True but that’s why I’m here advocating for it. Political opposition can be overcome. The physics of a speeding multi-ton object cannot.
Sure, but that's gonna be at least half a generation leading up to your five year estimate.
The verge's article on the same incident went on a tangent about how tech companies have been continously facing issues with these kinds of devices destroyed. Can't have a ride sharing program if all the bikes, scooters, vehicles are vandalized or destroyed. No way we're going to rid of personally owned vehicles if the alternatives are continously under attack.
W
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZGzMfg381Y
Driverless cars are cool as fuck but still need their kinks worked out. Driving sucks and so does doing it for a living, I don't see a real negative especially once the tech cements them as safer than human driven cars, or at least no real negative which doesn't have it's root in our broken economic system.
An other article explain it got stuck in the crowd and then stopped moving as it should. Embarrassing to see people cheering on mindless vandalism and sharing false info.
Edit: it doesn't seem to be very clear what happened and there's conflicting information so my last paragraph might be completely wrong and even worse, hypocritical.
I disagree about being no negatives. Cars with or without drivers are ruining both our cities and our planet and San Francisco already has multiple excellent public transportation options. All driverless cars do is discourage people from taking public transit.
To be fair, calling San Francisco's public transportation 'excellent' isn't something I can agree with after living there for over a decade haha. But it is better than nothing 🤷
I see them as a stepping stone towards a mostly carless society personally.
I also think anyone being discouraged from taking public transit would likewise buy a car before taking public transit. I can even see the opposite, where it lets people who still need a car 5% of the time sell their ride in exchange for mostly public transit and a bit of taxi.
Individually owned cars are the devil and true public transport is definitely king, but I think driverless taxi services can serve an important niche.
I think you're missing the end goal here, which is having everyone in a driverless car. The taxis are a first step in that direction. It will by no means stop there.
There was a reason why GM was investing so heavily in Cruise (until a woman got dragged under a Cruise car in SF during a crash). They weren't doing it in the hopes people would transition to public transit.
I'm not missing the end goal, I just don't think GM will pull back if we decide to ban driverless cars or boycott them.
We both want 100% public transport but that's beside the point, the event happened because the car was driverless, not because it wasn't a bus.
If someone was proposing to ban all cars in San Francisco, I'm all for it but that isn't really what's happening. But for now, I'll take driverless cars even if it only gets rid of a couple privately owned ones.
You're right. It isn't what's happening and I am proposing a ban on personal transport in San Francisco (and other major metropolitan areas with decent public transportation systems).
I also don't see this as a path to that happening. And that should be the goal.
The obvious intent is that driverless cars would be a new model of ownership. Where you buy the car, then pay a yearly flat subscription to use driverless features.
Step 2 would be an insurance reduction for removing manual driving, then they could start per-mile system like ISP and cell phone providers do per gigabyte of data used.
It's going to weird when people are choosing a vehicle based on whether it will decide to drive you off the cliff, or just plow through the pedestrian. There will be a Jerryrigeverything who buys cars to test their self driving to destruction.
Given how little liability auto manufactures have due to the responsibility put on the driver, I don't see why they would be pushing for self driving. Unless there's a single unified AI that makes the same driving decisions for every car, which I don't think is a good thing, the manufactures will then take the responsibility for accidents involving their proprietary driving software.
Honestly? I don't know that it would be the worst thing, especially on busy highways and streets, to have the same AI controlling all of the traffic instead of individual self-driving cars from individual brands, all with different software and hardware.
In the full original post I saw, it was trying to move forward and honking.
There seems to be a lot of different version and witnesses saying different thing. I edited my previous post.
Clearly a crime worthy of complete destruction.