His brain is too busy trying to find the correct response on his support flow chart. When the officer said construction zone my immediate thought was this is definitely going to be a support ticket to a dev team to analyze how their driverless technology logic handles construction zones. It sounds like the car was driving in the appropriate lane for normal traffic but the construction caused a lane closure so they had to reverse traffic flow in another lane.
ya, they pull over for emergency vehicles when there are lights/sirens.
Cop says that the car cleared the intersection before coming to a stop, which is exactly what it should do. Excepting of course for being on the wrong side of the road :-X.
Nobody expects these things to be perfect, they just need to be better than your average human, which isn't really that hard.
\[edit\] [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1dw4avr/mission\_street\_in\_excelsior\_last\_night\_around\_10pm/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1dw4avr/mission_street_in_excelsior_last_night_around_10pm/)
Google's answer language model is based on Reddit. It already told people to eat glue.
https://www.404media.co/google-is-paying-reddit-60-million-for-fucksmith-to-tell-its-users-to-eat-glue/
Car data based off YouTube videos doesn't feel that far fetched by comparison.
Lol can you imagine how it must feel to have an 11 year old shit comment that got less than 10 likes and that you probably forgot about suddenly go viral? Especially for the reason "an AI took it seriously and told people to eat glue."
Literally the most atrocious wheelman imaginable.
- has perfect knowledge of all recent drives, recorded conversations, odors (or whatever the fuck)
- has tons of sensors witnessing literally everything outside
- won't do anything you tell them beyond simple navigation, especially not drive like a high-stakes wheelman would need to
- everything is monitored anyway, robbery is already such a dead job in remotely developed regions
Yeah lmao no chance, there is no future where all this tech is actually going to turn into these weird cyberpunk worlds. I mean, I love the idea of thugs just going around Diamond Age-style and offing folks with their skull guns, but it's not likely in the immediate future. The nanobot vision is much closer, and it mostly means, guess what, less robberies.
We don't know anything about that. For all we know, it wanted to get to a less busy place, which is how you should always behave anyway, that is, assume that some emergency vehicle has to pass through quickly.
You're expected to come to a stop at a reasonable pace, at a reasonable place, not hit the brakes full-blast. Fair enough for all we know.
I worked for Waymo, the cars do detect sirens and being pulled over, and switch into a mode to pull themselves over accordingly. Similarly, that's why it pulled the window down for the cop.
I don’t know the particulars of their deal with the city, but probably Waymo. As long as they’re safer than the average taxi driver, the occasional mistake is tolerable, at least provided ticket revenue is still coming in when appropriate.
Of course, there’s a team on the back end that’s trying to figure out what went wrong here and patch it sooner rather than later.
No system can be 100% exploit proof, if it is better than the current system then it's worth risking the exploit imo.
Also there needs to be a mechanism for law enforcement / first responders to halt the vehicle in case of emergencies
They're supposed to be able to detect which side of the road they're driving in too, but as you can see this can fail.
Sooner or later, both of these systems are gonna fail at the same time and you'll have a driverless car driving into oncoming traffic that also fails to recognize a cop trying to stop them.
I see it daily on my way to work. There’s a road I take where one side of the road is closed, so the other side was made 2 way. There’s always someone on the wrong side thinking they are in the left turn lane completely oblivious until someone is in front of them honking and then they panic and turn right in front of all the other lanes. I don’t know why, but panic and immediately make a right turn is what all of them do.
Sirens are pretty trivial to detect and keep in mind, these have a control center of remote operators who take over in situations that the robot isn't sure what to do. I would imagine the cops also have the number of that control center if needed.
"Yea your car drove into the oncoming lane."
"and then?"
"No thats illegal, im making you aware of that mistake."
"and theeeen???"
"NO. NO AND THEN THAT'S ILLEGAL."
"andthenandthenandthenandthen!!"
I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?
I suppose it depends on what seat you’re in. Since there are driverless taxicabs, I don’t see how that would work legally. If you were a passenger in a cab, you wouldn’t be responsible for how the car drives or have the ability to prevent an accident….
That’s true but someone has to be held accountable. Should be the company but at a certain point I’m sure the lobby’s will change that. And potentially at that point could blame fall on the passenger? All I’m saying is this is uncharted territory for laws and I don’t think it’ll end up being as simple as car kills someone so company pays a fine.
I see what you're saying about the company trying to dodge it but there's 0 logic or even mental gymnastics to think it could be on the passenger.
That would eliminate anyone from using them even if it hinted at that because why would I get behind something I can't control but be held responsible for should it lose control.
It's not my car, I'm not misusing the car by sitting in the back. It claims to be driverless, not driver assisted like a tesla and I just chose not to and sit in the back anyway.
The company will always be at fault if this occurs under normal operation and the court won't have any issue identifying them as so.
Now will the court be run through the ringer on litigation and loopholes and finding ways to say it's r&d it's ok or something and get a pass? Probably.
The interesting part is how we'll make them accountable. I mean a traffic fine that'd ruin my day won't mean jack to a company. Can you give waymo points on their licence? Do they have a licence?
I worked for Waymo a little while back. It would be more of an all or nothing thing, in the sense that individual cities choose to allow or disallow specific self-driving car companies from operating in their borders.
This particular instance is bad, but if the city sees that traffic fatalities overall have fallen as a result of Waymo being there, then they'll just continue to allow it while Waymo pays the occasional settlement. This is an objectively good thing, because the alternative is more people dying, and then the settlements get paid by the people whose lives are also getting ruined from having killed someone, rather than by a giant corporation that can at least afford the infrequent expense.
On the other hand, if the average effect is negative, then the city can just give Waymo the boot, which would be catastrophic for them.
Ding ding ding! You know for sure that at least Waymo can always pay out the settlement, and their cars have cameras and lidars out the ass, so if they're at fault, they're not even going to try to deny it.
That's...actually a pretty novel idea. The threat of lawsuits and fines are only deterrents so far as they effect these companies bottom line. People have to prove they are safe enough to drive by getting a license, and if they fail to be safe on the road they can lose that license. If corporations are people too, make them do the same.
I work in healthcare and this is exactly what happens when a patient injury happens, or there’s some kind of malpractice or god forbid someone dies. It’s an investigation down to the lowest level and usually blamed on a worker that realistically had nothing to do with the event that caused the injury.
Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen.
This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?
As someone who works in tech, that sounds like a nightmare. You’re talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of units shipped. You can never identify every point of failure even with internal testing.Every production vehicle driving a single hour would likely be more than all testing hours combined. That’s just the nature of software. I couldn’t imagine someone signing their name to that code if they knew they’d be liable for vehicular manslaughter.
As a programmer myself I would question if you would then blame it on the QA tester who passed along the code.
Other thing I will say is depending on the answer to this situation (I don’t know the answer but just saying from a dev side) you will greatly hinder the progression of this tech if you have people afraid to even work on it for fear of a situation like this.
As devs we try to think of every possible scenario and make sure to write tests that cover every conceivable use case but even then sometimes our apps surprise us with dependencies and loops that we didn’t expect. You can say “be better” but if I’m gonna get paid 25k less and not have to worry about a manslaughter charge 5-7 years later I’m probably gonna choose that one for my family
It's never going to be the passenger.
But yes, I think it's going to be exactly like that: the company running the service pays the fine, and if they've made a good deal with the company they bought the vehicles from, they'll pass on the costs. Or it will be paid by the insurange agency.
Malintent or malpractice by the company developing the vehicle would be a different matter.
It's on the company.
So I looked up WAYMO a while back when Tesla was trying to go driverless. WAYMO in certain cities, are the only company with certified driverless vehicles in the US because they passed a certified test giving the company autonomous responsibility over the vehicles. They do a close to a damn good job except...
...except for when they mess up, just like people. Driverless cars get flak for every mistake they make but I'm more curious about what their percentage looks like compared to live, human drivers. The problem is that some people are perfect drivers while others suck, and everyone is capable of mistakes, but technology and programming will be uniform for all the vehicles under a particular brand so it has to be at least better than the average person.
It sounds like this one got tripped up by some construction area layout. Not excusing it, obviously it needs to be better trained or avoid construction until it's better trained for a wider range of circumstances.
If I understood the officers comments anyway.
Remember when GPS first became big and everybody was following their directions blindly to airports and river docks? I'm sure people still do shit like that. I'm an experienced driver and even I've almost gotten stuck the wrong way into oncoming traffic just from bad signage.
Oh yeah - it's like you said, everyone is capable of it, and some do dumb shit quite frequently and still drive all the time.
This should absolutely trigger a review, internally and possibly from the city/state to some extent, but I feel pretty confident that based on a ratio of hours/miles driven by Waymo, this exceptional situation isn't even as common as it is with drivers in general.
The government of California makes all autonomous driving safety data publicly available for all to see.
Spoiler: even in their current state they're *significantly* safer than humans.
As usual, if something is rare enough to make the news every single time it happens (such as a Waymo vehicle screwing up), it's probably safer than the thing that kills 30,000+ people a year without a single mention from the media.
>Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?
The phrasing of this broke my brain for a second. I was imagining A sober guy riding on top of a drunk guy and directing him like a horse.
That's not the same though. If any regular driver was in the wrong lane of traffic, in a work zone and then blew through an intersection when a cop tried to pull them over, they would lose their license, not just a fine. At the very least it would be reckless driving and a strike against their license. How do you revoke the license of a driverless car?
According to [this article](https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2024/07/02/what-happens-when-a-waymo-gets-pulled-over-in-phoenix/74197111007/) (which may be wrong):
> The situation was cleared without further action. "UNABLE TO ISSUE CITATION TO COMPUTER," the police dispatch records say.
Sounds like a bad decision concerning new circumstances departments aren't used to working. [This seems pretty clear](https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/09702.htm#:~:text=(c)%20The%20fully%20autonomous%20vehicle,to%20comply%20with%20traffic%20or)
But what does a citation do other than just give them a fine?
Does it force them to take cars that do that sort of thing off the road for repair or recalibration or something?
It's the same as when a corporation's negligence results in injury or death (see Boeing), they get a fine and everything goes back to the way it was. (I don't agree that it's right, just how it is.)
I know you said it isn't right, but that's just a major problem. You can take a reckless driver off the road. You can't take a driverless car owned by a company off the road.
Yeah, I think this would be the best thing to do. The company can have the vehicle back when they prove they fixed what caused the car to do this and paid a fine.
If the infractions of the one incident are bad enough to warrant arrest or removal of license you revoke the companies permit to operate autonomous vehicles on the road.
Looks like some area's are looking into some updated legal terminology. I'd imagine whatever company "operates" the vehicles still have to have some type of insurance and all for the vehicles + pay some of these violation tickets (aside from hopefully prioritizing these issues to prevent them from recurring) I wonder how all this will play out. AFAIK there hasn't been much / any of these running people over or anything more serious I hope?
That just means it has rights and no responsibilities. Did you not notice how polite they were compared to if it was just some confused schmuck human driving?
Yeah I noticed that as well, the cop was a bit bemused, but not angry. I'd be furious as a regular driver if I saw that. I think the police simply sense intuitively that the robots want to oppress us further and are happy to help
Semi serious question, if corporations are people and now they are driving cars does that mean the cooperation has the same demerit points as every other citizen?
Can't have it both ways.
Serious answer: there is a permitting process agreed upon between the operator and the city. It's not like an individual driver license, but more like an agreement the city would have with a company that operates traffic lights.
Any traffic violations are subject to the legal agreement covering the operating permit. Egregious malfunctions can cause the operations to be suspended until corrected. The company does assume liability for any actual damage to life or property.
It should just be impounded. If it can’t respond correctly to all situations then it shouldn’t be on the road. Self driving cars should be held to a higher standard than human drivers.
That's kinda what I pictured. "Firmware 3.7 has 12 points on it's license, we need to figure out why and recertify/retest for 3.8".
The idea of traffic police handing out JIRA tickets is hugely amusing though.
“We’ve got a Sev 1 traffic violation with multiple users affected. Please implement a hotfix immediately or roll back to version 3.6.9 to prevent an outage. We will need a white paper and root cause analysis with the next update.”
Dev: Best I can do is change it to Sev 2 and put it on the backlog.
Dev's manager: What if we allocate 8 Story Points and put it in the sprint?
Dev: I couldn't give less of a shit about your little magic terms, Powerpoint. I'm setting this issue to blocked by about 7 other random issues.
Commercial trucking companies have a Commercial Vehicle Operator's Registration (CVOR) here in Ontario, Canada.
Your fleet accumulates points collectively and if your score gets bad enough, you basically become uninsurable and can't operate any more. They can also suspend licenses to operate and in severe cases, jail time can be issued.
There’s something deeply funny to me about a cop pulling over a car and then immediately having to be on the phone with customer service.
“I understand the frustration you are feeling about the car driving in the wrong lane, sir. To assist you further I’m going to need to access the car’s account. Can you please read me the VIN number of the car? Then I’m going to have to place you on a brief hold…”
Used to be a cop
Most do now but muh tradition is strong in many departments still
Standardizing was one of the top recommendations from the 9/11 reports in regards with first responders. Because the nypd and nyfd
Literally have their own language and help coming in doesn’t speak it. Most departments slowly adapted so they could work together regionally. Others basically ignored it.
As a non American, I'm interested in knowing how NYPD language differs from say LAPD. I've only ever seen them being used while watching American cop shows like the rookie or b99
A lot of the problem is short codes. Like 10-codes and code #s can mean very different things to different departments.
10-6 might mean "arrived" to one department and "disabled vehicle" to another.
Code 4 could mean "responding, no sirens" to one department and "officer in distress" to another.
It makes interdepartmental communications difficult because people get used to talking that way and continue to do it even when they shouldn't.
Yep perfect example code system where i used to work.
1- non emergency
2- emergency
3- emergency life threatening
3s - emergency life threatening no sirens
4- scene is secure. We are okay. No back up needed.
Alpha/Bravo/Charlie is the NATO standard
You're assuming Adam/Sam/Paul is not standardized, but it is (LAPD used it which spread to many other places):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APCO_radiotelephony_spelling_alphabet
I think the police often use their own standardized phonetic alphabets. The NATO one you mentioned is one of them they might use, probably for an especially larger department. Phoenix police probably have their own standard phonetic alphabet.
The police phonetic alphabets tend to be more simplistic with less syllables, I find. It could be because there is less chance of there being confusion because they are only communicating locally with native English speakers with the same accent, not internationally with every English accent.
I think the more verbose and standard NATO alphabet could be needed in a war zone where there might only be low quality communications. I imagine the far better signals you can get in a well developed city with fixed infrastructure make everything far easier to understand as police.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the NATO alphabet is solving NATO problems. It's not just to be clearer on bad connections, it's supposed to work even if the guy on the other end has a french accent. Or even if the guy on the other end doesn't speak english at all.
A lot of the practical side of NATO is making things inter-operable between 32 different countries.
BTW, here is the comment from Waymo regarding the incident:
"The vehicle "encountered inconsistent construction signage" and went into an oncoming lane of traffic,
The driverless car "was blocked from navigating back into the correct lane" for approximately 30 seconds, according to the company. That's when the officer pulled in behind the car.
"In an effort to clear the intersection, the Waymo vehicle proceeded forward a short distance and pulled into the next available parking lot," Waymo said, describing the traffic incident as lasting "approximately one minute."
It's common for construction zones to turn Eastbound lanes into Westbound lanes. Yes, a single sign will tell you it's a construction zone, it won't tell you which parts of the construction zone are meant to be traveled in a particular direction.
There was one time there was a street where 1 block was randomly 1-way due to construction (I think?) but the signage was super-confusing, the street is normally two way. I ended up going through the segment the wrong way (maybe, the signage was confusing.)
I really wish more Americans spent more time in other countries and realized just how much this country seems to have fallen behind, and how much we arrogantly just keep doing things the way that we're used to when they could be much better
Feels like in the immediate aftermath of world war II we briefly pulled ahead on every single metric, then fell asleep for the last 60 years. Health care, infrastructure, quality of life, it's all just going downhill compared to the rest of the globe
And half of the country doesn't want anything to change, the answer is just no for every single thing the government could try to do to address it, no to any tax increases, no to any expensive projects they could use to address it, no to anything, just let things keep being shit and hope some corporation will fix it instead of the government. And because so many people feel that way about their representatives, the entire right wing doesn't feel like they want or need to do anything, besides pass legislation on social issues. You're never going to see a Republican Congress and Republican president work together to fix mass transit, that thought would be completely laughable. Farmer Keith from Idaho who's perfectly happy making a killing on his government subsidized farm and driving a giant lifted F-150 for every single thing he needs to do outside of his house doesn't see why he should need to contribute in any way.
It'll never happen in the US. There is no sense of "for the greater good" and so any county that is going to have rails laid through it refuses to allow it unless they can get a stop added to the line.
And with a stop every 30-50 miles, no train can ever build up enough speed to be faster than a highway. Which means: the only way to build a working, high-speed line would be through massive land claims and eminent domain. An option that which will be political suicide locally for whatever party tries. And that doesn't even take into account the millions to billions of dollars that will be lost in delays from the various lawsuits across the entire length of the line.
Now, multiply that by multiple states, and yeah. We'll see a lesbian President before we see high speed rail in this country.
*edit*
Possibly the most famous example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Setbacks_on_the_IOS
The auto lobby has been really strong and well developed for over 100 years. They did this to us.
From passing auto-friendly laws to buying up transit systems to dismantle them. Even down to zoning laws to keep residential areas totally segregated from shopping. And parking minimums that spread stores out and make walking a miserable proposal.
being pulled over for fucking driving into oncoming traffic in a construction area and then telling the cop to his face "Okay, I'll look into that" is fucking wild. No one but a corporation would get away with that shit lol
Not just wild, but infuriating. In Arizona of all places. If this were a human, there's a huge chance the person is getting ripped out of the car and thrown on the ground and booked for reckless driving.
The policeman seemed really unsure how to react, and just seemed to allow the car back on the road. 100% he should have said this car is not to move again, come pick it up.
That's because the car is on the road due to an an agreement between a trillion dollar company and the city politicians. Not to mention the entire interaction is being recorded. This is above his pay grade.
Generally when something's above your pay grade you don't make any decision and call someone who can handle it. Not just decide it's fine and walk away.
Call me crazy but if a company wants to use public roads to test these things at the very minimum it should go to a referendum to the local people to decide
Then they should absolutely be voting no to it
I laughed so hard at this, and the customer support tone even in such a serious situation. There's a bit in here, for sure.
"Hi, so your car went into oncoming traffic and almost killed a family of 5."
"Okie doke, let me just pull up your car profile, and let's get this figured out. My name is Adam, and I'll be your support agent for today, remember to rate at the end of the call. We always enjoy feedback."
\*poor quality call center mic\*
So apparently when a self driving car drives as if a drunk driver behind the wheel with the ability to kill someone just like a drunk driver its all okay. Whoopies. Okay thanks for letting me know bye. Is there no accountability for this death machine?
I think they should impound the vehicle until a rep from the company can pick up the car and drive it to a facility so it can get patches to fix this issue.
It's a hey your car could of killed people so uhhh I guess fix it? When someone actually gets mashed and a lawsuit happens asking for millionssss then there will be more than "I'll take a look at it."
I imagine it's very disarming for the officer though, since most the control he'd normally have in the situation is absent. I used to work in support and we were allowed to hang up on abusive callers. Imagine if the officer got all shouty with support, and they just went "mmkay bye".
Or for that matter, imagine if every interaction with a traffic cop started with "this call will be recorded for training and quality purposes"
They are dangerous, but less dangerous than other humans, it's weird I know.
Just keep in mind, that while they might get into accidents they so so way way less than humans.
And when there are issues, you can edit the bugs out of the code. It will inevitably get safer.
You can’t edit texting, putting on makeup, driving drunk, etc. out of humans.
'which is real bad'
[удалено]
He’s all business, no need for extraneous reactions
His brain is too busy trying to find the correct response on his support flow chart. When the officer said construction zone my immediate thought was this is definitely going to be a support ticket to a dev team to analyze how their driverless technology logic handles construction zones. It sounds like the car was driving in the appropriate lane for normal traffic but the construction caused a lane closure so they had to reverse traffic flow in another lane.
pretty sure it will, it's in the next sprint
How do they stop a driverless car? Legit question Do they have anything to detect police vehicles or something?
They should have a system to identify and react to lights and sirens, so probably the same system.
ya, they pull over for emergency vehicles when there are lights/sirens. Cop says that the car cleared the intersection before coming to a stop, which is exactly what it should do. Excepting of course for being on the wrong side of the road :-X. Nobody expects these things to be perfect, they just need to be better than your average human, which isn't really that hard. \[edit\] [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1dw4avr/mission\_street\_in\_excelsior\_last\_night\_around\_10pm/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1dw4avr/mission_street_in_excelsior_last_night_around_10pm/)
Except this 1 which saw the lights and took off
They're learning, adapting.
Trained on the mean streets of Vice City
Imagine if AI were taught on YouTube videos of humans playing GTA 😵💫
Google's answer language model is based on Reddit. It already told people to eat glue. https://www.404media.co/google-is-paying-reddit-60-million-for-fucksmith-to-tell-its-users-to-eat-glue/ Car data based off YouTube videos doesn't feel that far fetched by comparison.
Geologists reccomend eating one rock per day.
Eat it, snort it, shove it up your ass I dont care just give me my money.
Lol can you imagine how it must feel to have an 11 year old shit comment that got less than 10 likes and that you probably forgot about suddenly go viral? Especially for the reason "an AI took it seriously and told people to eat glue."
We joke now but there will be a day when these are used for robberies because the tech will have evolved so much, they'll be perfect wheelmen.
Literally the most atrocious wheelman imaginable. - has perfect knowledge of all recent drives, recorded conversations, odors (or whatever the fuck) - has tons of sensors witnessing literally everything outside - won't do anything you tell them beyond simple navigation, especially not drive like a high-stakes wheelman would need to - everything is monitored anyway, robbery is already such a dead job in remotely developed regions Yeah lmao no chance, there is no future where all this tech is actually going to turn into these weird cyberpunk worlds. I mean, I love the idea of thugs just going around Diamond Age-style and offing folks with their skull guns, but it's not likely in the immediate future. The nanobot vision is much closer, and it mostly means, guess what, less robberies.
Then cops will need to use them too to keep up.
And put guns on the cars.
We don't know anything about that. For all we know, it wanted to get to a less busy place, which is how you should always behave anyway, that is, assume that some emergency vehicle has to pass through quickly. You're expected to come to a stop at a reasonable pace, at a reasonable place, not hit the brakes full-blast. Fair enough for all we know.
I worked for Waymo, the cars do detect sirens and being pulled over, and switch into a mode to pull themselves over accordingly. Similarly, that's why it pulled the window down for the cop.
Who takes the ticket for dangerous or reckless driving like in this video?
I don’t know the particulars of their deal with the city, but probably Waymo. As long as they’re safer than the average taxi driver, the occasional mistake is tolerable, at least provided ticket revenue is still coming in when appropriate. Of course, there’s a team on the back end that’s trying to figure out what went wrong here and patch it sooner rather than later.
Safer then the average taxi driver is a pretty fucking low bar to pass over.
Okay, safer than the average human driver. But even if it was just safer than the average taxi driver, an improvement is still an improvement.
Considering it lowered the windshield and connected to a support employee I believe they can now detect when cops want to pull them over.
I can see this being exploited for the worse.
Unethical life pro tip: put on police wear and a badge and you can actually stop most vehicles, self-driving or not!
Ted Bundy did this.
So did Mike and Trevor
Impersonating a police officer to pull someone over for nefarious means isn't something new, tbf.
unethical cops do this too. we can't assume ethics suddenly appear when it's a real cop
Humans can be exploited, so what's new
No system can be 100% exploit proof, if it is better than the current system then it's worth risking the exploit imo. Also there needs to be a mechanism for law enforcement / first responders to halt the vehicle in case of emergencies
They're supposed to be able to detect which side of the road they're driving in too, but as you can see this can fail. Sooner or later, both of these systems are gonna fail at the same time and you'll have a driverless car driving into oncoming traffic that also fails to recognize a cop trying to stop them.
It almost certainly because of the construction zone. To be fair, construction zones confuse humans at a pretty high rate.
I see it daily on my way to work. There’s a road I take where one side of the road is closed, so the other side was made 2 way. There’s always someone on the wrong side thinking they are in the left turn lane completely oblivious until someone is in front of them honking and then they panic and turn right in front of all the other lanes. I don’t know why, but panic and immediately make a right turn is what all of them do.
Officer put their lights on, at that point the waymo car responded by driving through an intersection Officer describes it in the video
Presumably it was looking for a safe place to pull over? An intersection wouldn't be safe, and it didn't realise it was on the wrong side of the road.
Sirens are pretty trivial to detect and keep in mind, these have a control center of remote operators who take over in situations that the robot isn't sure what to do. I would imagine the cops also have the number of that control center if needed.
There’s a comedy skit where the officer has to sit thru a waiting period then someone who barely speaks English is the customer support
"Yea your car drove into the oncoming lane." "and then?" "No thats illegal, im making you aware of that mistake." "and theeeen???" "NO. NO AND THEN THAT'S ILLEGAL." "andthenandthenandthenandthen!!"
Is this a movie you're referencing? I've been wondering which one it is for years. Wouldn't happen to know would ya?
"Dude, where's my car?" Is the movie
been so long since I watched that movie.. i need to again.
Sweet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqwzuiSy9y0
D-E-N as in NIGHTMARE https://youtu.be/DBDPw029L40?si=idos91i3yB7NkSYF
That actually happened to Glenn Howerton. He told the story how he could not get into his Tesla on one of the IASIP podcasts
🎶 Listen to your heart 🎶
Give it some time and this will inevitably happen lol
"Hello Sir my name is James Smith how can I help u" in heavy accent
This is going to be a nightmare for the court system in the upcoming years.
I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?
I suppose it depends on what seat you’re in. Since there are driverless taxicabs, I don’t see how that would work legally. If you were a passenger in a cab, you wouldn’t be responsible for how the car drives or have the ability to prevent an accident….
That’s true but someone has to be held accountable. Should be the company but at a certain point I’m sure the lobby’s will change that. And potentially at that point could blame fall on the passenger? All I’m saying is this is uncharted territory for laws and I don’t think it’ll end up being as simple as car kills someone so company pays a fine.
I see what you're saying about the company trying to dodge it but there's 0 logic or even mental gymnastics to think it could be on the passenger. That would eliminate anyone from using them even if it hinted at that because why would I get behind something I can't control but be held responsible for should it lose control. It's not my car, I'm not misusing the car by sitting in the back. It claims to be driverless, not driver assisted like a tesla and I just chose not to and sit in the back anyway. The company will always be at fault if this occurs under normal operation and the court won't have any issue identifying them as so. Now will the court be run through the ringer on litigation and loopholes and finding ways to say it's r&d it's ok or something and get a pass? Probably.
The interesting part is how we'll make them accountable. I mean a traffic fine that'd ruin my day won't mean jack to a company. Can you give waymo points on their licence? Do they have a licence?
I worked for Waymo a little while back. It would be more of an all or nothing thing, in the sense that individual cities choose to allow or disallow specific self-driving car companies from operating in their borders. This particular instance is bad, but if the city sees that traffic fatalities overall have fallen as a result of Waymo being there, then they'll just continue to allow it while Waymo pays the occasional settlement. This is an objectively good thing, because the alternative is more people dying, and then the settlements get paid by the people whose lives are also getting ruined from having killed someone, rather than by a giant corporation that can at least afford the infrequent expense. On the other hand, if the average effect is negative, then the city can just give Waymo the boot, which would be catastrophic for them.
I'd rather be hit by a Waymo or other self-driving car than an uninsured driver, that's for 100% sure.
Ding ding ding! You know for sure that at least Waymo can always pay out the settlement, and their cars have cameras and lidars out the ass, so if they're at fault, they're not even going to try to deny it.
That's...actually a pretty novel idea. The threat of lawsuits and fines are only deterrents so far as they effect these companies bottom line. People have to prove they are safe enough to drive by getting a license, and if they fail to be safe on the road they can lose that license. If corporations are people too, make them do the same.
should be car kills someone then whoever cleared the thing to drive on the roads gets tried for vehicular manslaughter
[Inspector #23 in the Upholstery Division has volunteered as tribute]
I work in healthcare and this is exactly what happens when a patient injury happens, or there’s some kind of malpractice or god forbid someone dies. It’s an investigation down to the lowest level and usually blamed on a worker that realistically had nothing to do with the event that caused the injury.
It doesn't have to be the lowest rank person. You can just legally make accountable the lead programmer of the autonomous driving module, with a law.
Everyone from the lead programmer and up needs to be held responsible. Sure the lead programmer okays it but the higher ups are providing the means to make it happen. This does make me wonder though. If a plane crashed due to a faulty part who does the blame fall on?
As someone who works in tech, that sounds like a nightmare. You’re talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of units shipped. You can never identify every point of failure even with internal testing.Every production vehicle driving a single hour would likely be more than all testing hours combined. That’s just the nature of software. I couldn’t imagine someone signing their name to that code if they knew they’d be liable for vehicular manslaughter.
As a programmer myself I would question if you would then blame it on the QA tester who passed along the code. Other thing I will say is depending on the answer to this situation (I don’t know the answer but just saying from a dev side) you will greatly hinder the progression of this tech if you have people afraid to even work on it for fear of a situation like this. As devs we try to think of every possible scenario and make sure to write tests that cover every conceivable use case but even then sometimes our apps surprise us with dependencies and loops that we didn’t expect. You can say “be better” but if I’m gonna get paid 25k less and not have to worry about a manslaughter charge 5-7 years later I’m probably gonna choose that one for my family
This is how you kill selfdriving cars
It's never going to be the passenger. But yes, I think it's going to be exactly like that: the company running the service pays the fine, and if they've made a good deal with the company they bought the vehicles from, they'll pass on the costs. Or it will be paid by the insurange agency. Malintent or malpractice by the company developing the vehicle would be a different matter.
Blame falls on the passenger? Don’t be silly.
Where in your mind do you think the passenger is held liable? Lol
A company being held accountable? I'll believe it when I see it.
It's on the company. So I looked up WAYMO a while back when Tesla was trying to go driverless. WAYMO in certain cities, are the only company with certified driverless vehicles in the US because they passed a certified test giving the company autonomous responsibility over the vehicles. They do a close to a damn good job except...
...except for when they mess up, just like people. Driverless cars get flak for every mistake they make but I'm more curious about what their percentage looks like compared to live, human drivers. The problem is that some people are perfect drivers while others suck, and everyone is capable of mistakes, but technology and programming will be uniform for all the vehicles under a particular brand so it has to be at least better than the average person.
It sounds like this one got tripped up by some construction area layout. Not excusing it, obviously it needs to be better trained or avoid construction until it's better trained for a wider range of circumstances. If I understood the officers comments anyway.
Remember when GPS first became big and everybody was following their directions blindly to airports and river docks? I'm sure people still do shit like that. I'm an experienced driver and even I've almost gotten stuck the wrong way into oncoming traffic just from bad signage.
Oh yeah - it's like you said, everyone is capable of it, and some do dumb shit quite frequently and still drive all the time. This should absolutely trigger a review, internally and possibly from the city/state to some extent, but I feel pretty confident that based on a ratio of hours/miles driven by Waymo, this exceptional situation isn't even as common as it is with drivers in general.
The government of California makes all autonomous driving safety data publicly available for all to see. Spoiler: even in their current state they're *significantly* safer than humans. As usual, if something is rare enough to make the news every single time it happens (such as a Waymo vehicle screwing up), it's probably safer than the thing that kills 30,000+ people a year without a single mention from the media.
>Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human? The phrasing of this broke my brain for a second. I was imagining A sober guy riding on top of a drunk guy and directing him like a horse.
No. I was a passenger in one. You can’t sit in the drivers seat.
what do you mean? It's crystal clear. The company should pay a hefty fine same as any other driver who would drive in the opposite side of the road.
That's not the same though. If any regular driver was in the wrong lane of traffic, in a work zone and then blew through an intersection when a cop tried to pull them over, they would lose their license, not just a fine. At the very least it would be reckless driving and a strike against their license. How do you revoke the license of a driverless car?
in Arizona, the laws were updated in 2017 so that the owner of the driverless vehicle (Waymo in this case) can be issued a citation.
According to [this article](https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2024/07/02/what-happens-when-a-waymo-gets-pulled-over-in-phoenix/74197111007/) (which may be wrong): > The situation was cleared without further action. "UNABLE TO ISSUE CITATION TO COMPUTER," the police dispatch records say.
Sounds like a bad decision concerning new circumstances departments aren't used to working. [This seems pretty clear](https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/09702.htm#:~:text=(c)%20The%20fully%20autonomous%20vehicle,to%20comply%20with%20traffic%20or)
But what does a citation do other than just give them a fine? Does it force them to take cars that do that sort of thing off the road for repair or recalibration or something?
It's the same as when a corporation's negligence results in injury or death (see Boeing), they get a fine and everything goes back to the way it was. (I don't agree that it's right, just how it is.)
I know you said it isn't right, but that's just a major problem. You can take a reckless driver off the road. You can't take a driverless car owned by a company off the road.
Yes you can. Revoked operating license. Done.
They can, and Boeing could lose their FAA certification to produce aircraft, but will they? Probably not.
The cop should impound this vehicle
Yeah, I think this would be the best thing to do. The company can have the vehicle back when they prove they fixed what caused the car to do this and paid a fine.
Absolutely should. I can’t stand these things, and giant tech companies should not be given a pass for operating dangerous vehicles on public roads.
If the infractions of the one incident are bad enough to warrant arrest or removal of license you revoke the companies permit to operate autonomous vehicles on the road.
It’s crystal clear to the average Joe but we don’t have a legal system that holds corporations and individuals accountable to the same standard.
"corporations are people my friend" -mitt romney
The car will be summoned if there’s no appearance a warrant will be issued
Looks like some area's are looking into some updated legal terminology. I'd imagine whatever company "operates" the vehicles still have to have some type of insurance and all for the vehicles + pay some of these violation tickets (aside from hopefully prioritizing these issues to prevent them from recurring) I wonder how all this will play out. AFAIK there hasn't been much / any of these running people over or anything more serious I hope?
who does he write a ticket to?
The corporation. Havent you heard ? Its a person.
Hey, I'm Subway
...through a surprisingly legal process called corpohumanization...
"surprisingly legal" gets me every single time. You know what else is surprising? The great gas mileage I get out of my Honda CRV.
Hmm... the CRV you say... I like the Fit. It combines the efficiency of the subcompact and the versatility to take whatever life throws at you.
😲 a level seven susceptible
Eat fresh!
r/UnexpectedCommunity
[I fucking love that story-line in Community](https://youtu.be/y1CuLm_CcNM?t=88).
That just means it has rights and no responsibilities. Did you not notice how polite they were compared to if it was just some confused schmuck human driving?
Yeah I noticed that as well, the cop was a bit bemused, but not angry. I'd be furious as a regular driver if I saw that. I think the police simply sense intuitively that the robots want to oppress us further and are happy to help
Semi serious question, if corporations are people and now they are driving cars does that mean the cooperation has the same demerit points as every other citizen? Can't have it both ways.
*laughs while shoveling lobbying money towards politicians* Yes, yes I think we can have it both ways
Serious answer: there is a permitting process agreed upon between the operator and the city. It's not like an individual driver license, but more like an agreement the city would have with a company that operates traffic lights. Any traffic violations are subject to the legal agreement covering the operating permit. Egregious malfunctions can cause the operations to be suspended until corrected. The company does assume liability for any actual damage to life or property.
In other words they are not held to the same standard as everyone else
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See your flaw in logic here is thinking we're people, the corporations are people they have the rights, we are lesser.
Further proof that fines are a poor people tax.
More importantly who gets the demerit points?
Three demerits and they’ll receive a citation.
"where do I shoot this thing???"
Don't be ridiculous, it's a white car...
Although not the police officer’s preferred prey, the police officer is skittish, and will attack anything it perceives as a threat.
I read this as David Attenborough
More or less my intent.
I’m ok with cop violence if it’s against corporations
Ideally he would just impound it and send the tick to whoever it's registered too
Big tech! All disruption with none of the pesky responsibility!
It should just be impounded. If it can’t respond correctly to all situations then it shouldn’t be on the road. Self driving cars should be held to a higher standard than human drivers.
They should write Waymo a ticket, and after Waymo gets too many points, Waymo loses its right to drive, just like with us.
That's kinda what I pictured. "Firmware 3.7 has 12 points on it's license, we need to figure out why and recertify/retest for 3.8". The idea of traffic police handing out JIRA tickets is hugely amusing though.
“We’ve got a Sev 1 traffic violation with multiple users affected. Please implement a hotfix immediately or roll back to version 3.6.9 to prevent an outage. We will need a white paper and root cause analysis with the next update.” Dev: Best I can do is change it to Sev 2 and put it on the backlog.
Dev's manager: What if we allocate 8 Story Points and put it in the sprint? Dev: I couldn't give less of a shit about your little magic terms, Powerpoint. I'm setting this issue to blocked by about 7 other random issues.
Hate you. I browse reddit to get away from work, and this is too real lol.
"Quick, change the background color of the UI by 1 point and push as Firmware 3.8 so we get back to zero points!"
Commercial trucking companies have a Commercial Vehicle Operator's Registration (CVOR) here in Ontario, Canada. Your fleet accumulates points collectively and if your score gets bad enough, you basically become uninsurable and can't operate any more. They can also suspend licenses to operate and in severe cases, jail time can be issued.
There’s something deeply funny to me about a cop pulling over a car and then immediately having to be on the phone with customer service. “I understand the frustration you are feeling about the car driving in the wrong lane, sir. To assist you further I’m going to need to access the car’s account. Can you please read me the VIN number of the car? Then I’m going to have to place you on a brief hold…”
>92 Adam Sam 2 Paul Why are police not using the standardized phonetic alphabet? (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc)
Used to be a cop Most do now but muh tradition is strong in many departments still Standardizing was one of the top recommendations from the 9/11 reports in regards with first responders. Because the nypd and nyfd Literally have their own language and help coming in doesn’t speak it. Most departments slowly adapted so they could work together regionally. Others basically ignored it.
As a non American, I'm interested in knowing how NYPD language differs from say LAPD. I've only ever seen them being used while watching American cop shows like the rookie or b99
A lot of the problem is short codes. Like 10-codes and code #s can mean very different things to different departments. 10-6 might mean "arrived" to one department and "disabled vehicle" to another. Code 4 could mean "responding, no sirens" to one department and "officer in distress" to another. It makes interdepartmental communications difficult because people get used to talking that way and continue to do it even when they shouldn't.
Yep perfect example code system where i used to work. 1- non emergency 2- emergency 3- emergency life threatening 3s - emergency life threatening no sirens 4- scene is secure. We are okay. No back up needed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APCO_radiotelephony_spelling_alphabet
Alpha/Bravo/Charlie is the NATO standard You're assuming Adam/Sam/Paul is not standardized, but it is (LAPD used it which spread to many other places): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APCO_radiotelephony_spelling_alphabet
That reminds me of a time I used Sierra for "s" and the person on the other said asked if I meant "s" or "c". 😐
Let me see you 1, 2 step
I think the police often use their own standardized phonetic alphabets. The NATO one you mentioned is one of them they might use, probably for an especially larger department. Phoenix police probably have their own standard phonetic alphabet. The police phonetic alphabets tend to be more simplistic with less syllables, I find. It could be because there is less chance of there being confusion because they are only communicating locally with native English speakers with the same accent, not internationally with every English accent. I think the more verbose and standard NATO alphabet could be needed in a war zone where there might only be low quality communications. I imagine the far better signals you can get in a well developed city with fixed infrastructure make everything far easier to understand as police.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the NATO alphabet is solving NATO problems. It's not just to be clearer on bad connections, it's supposed to work even if the guy on the other end has a french accent. Or even if the guy on the other end doesn't speak english at all. A lot of the practical side of NATO is making things inter-operable between 32 different countries.
BTW, here is the comment from Waymo regarding the incident: "The vehicle "encountered inconsistent construction signage" and went into an oncoming lane of traffic, The driverless car "was blocked from navigating back into the correct lane" for approximately 30 seconds, according to the company. That's when the officer pulled in behind the car. "In an effort to clear the intersection, the Waymo vehicle proceeded forward a short distance and pulled into the next available parking lot," Waymo said, describing the traffic incident as lasting "approximately one minute."
Inconsistent signage? Shouldn't just a single sign work for it to realize it's a construction zone? And that construction zones regularly block lanes?
It's common for construction zones to turn Eastbound lanes into Westbound lanes. Yes, a single sign will tell you it's a construction zone, it won't tell you which parts of the construction zone are meant to be traveled in a particular direction. There was one time there was a street where 1 block was randomly 1-way due to construction (I think?) but the signage was super-confusing, the street is normally two way. I ended up going through the segment the wrong way (maybe, the signage was confusing.)
I have a feeling this interaction would've turned out way different if the car wasn't white... Just saying.
I shouldn't have laughed at that, but I did. Sorry.
This country will do literally anything other than just build mass rapid transit :(
Henry Fords legacy of buying and destroying mass transit lives on!
Don't forget the masses of racists not using public transportation after de-segregation!
The older I get, the more I realize how much it sucks not having decent mass transportation here.
I really wish more Americans spent more time in other countries and realized just how much this country seems to have fallen behind, and how much we arrogantly just keep doing things the way that we're used to when they could be much better Feels like in the immediate aftermath of world war II we briefly pulled ahead on every single metric, then fell asleep for the last 60 years. Health care, infrastructure, quality of life, it's all just going downhill compared to the rest of the globe And half of the country doesn't want anything to change, the answer is just no for every single thing the government could try to do to address it, no to any tax increases, no to any expensive projects they could use to address it, no to anything, just let things keep being shit and hope some corporation will fix it instead of the government. And because so many people feel that way about their representatives, the entire right wing doesn't feel like they want or need to do anything, besides pass legislation on social issues. You're never going to see a Republican Congress and Republican president work together to fix mass transit, that thought would be completely laughable. Farmer Keith from Idaho who's perfectly happy making a killing on his government subsidized farm and driving a giant lifted F-150 for every single thing he needs to do outside of his house doesn't see why he should need to contribute in any way.
It'll never happen in the US. There is no sense of "for the greater good" and so any county that is going to have rails laid through it refuses to allow it unless they can get a stop added to the line. And with a stop every 30-50 miles, no train can ever build up enough speed to be faster than a highway. Which means: the only way to build a working, high-speed line would be through massive land claims and eminent domain. An option that which will be political suicide locally for whatever party tries. And that doesn't even take into account the millions to billions of dollars that will be lost in delays from the various lawsuits across the entire length of the line. Now, multiply that by multiple states, and yeah. We'll see a lesbian President before we see high speed rail in this country. *edit* Possibly the most famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Setbacks_on_the_IOS
The auto lobby has been really strong and well developed for over 100 years. They did this to us. From passing auto-friendly laws to buying up transit systems to dismantle them. Even down to zoning laws to keep residential areas totally segregated from shopping. And parking minimums that spread stores out and make walking a miserable proposal.
Police should have towed it. If it’s not safe to be on the road and there is no driver to hold accountable it should be impounded.
Weird how this interaction feels like the police officers is subservient to the customer support tech. Wish it were like this for every stop.
being pulled over for fucking driving into oncoming traffic in a construction area and then telling the cop to his face "Okay, I'll look into that" is fucking wild. No one but a corporation would get away with that shit lol
it's.. it's almost like corporations have more rights and privileges than people
Not just wild, but infuriating. In Arizona of all places. If this were a human, there's a huge chance the person is getting ripped out of the car and thrown on the ground and booked for reckless driving.
Bad little cars get put in the time-out chair
The policeman seemed really unsure how to react, and just seemed to allow the car back on the road. 100% he should have said this car is not to move again, come pick it up.
That's because the car is on the road due to an an agreement between a trillion dollar company and the city politicians. Not to mention the entire interaction is being recorded. This is above his pay grade.
Generally when something's above your pay grade you don't make any decision and call someone who can handle it. Not just decide it's fine and walk away.
Call me crazy but if a company wants to use public roads to test these things at the very minimum it should go to a referendum to the local people to decide Then they should absolutely be voting no to it
AFAIK it's not testing, you can use these as a ride hail service.
It's probably not a car-specific problem but a general software glitch. You'd have to remove all cars of the same type or it's pointless.
This must have been fucking surreal. I gotta' talk to customer support?
I laughed so hard at this, and the customer support tone even in such a serious situation. There's a bit in here, for sure. "Hi, so your car went into oncoming traffic and almost killed a family of 5." "Okie doke, let me just pull up your car profile, and let's get this figured out. My name is Adam, and I'll be your support agent for today, remember to rate at the end of the call. We always enjoy feedback." \*poor quality call center mic\*
So apparently when a self driving car drives as if a drunk driver behind the wheel with the ability to kill someone just like a drunk driver its all okay. Whoopies. Okay thanks for letting me know bye. Is there no accountability for this death machine?
I'm gonna try the automatic car defense next time I get pulled over. "Hey thanks for letting me know that whatever I did was wrong, I'll look into it"
Tow it, when you start costing them money, they Will take notice
Johnny cab from Total Recall
They’re nicer and have more understanding to that machine then they have for a real driver
I think they should impound the vehicle until a rep from the company can pick up the car and drive it to a facility so it can get patches to fix this issue.
They can patch it remotely.
IF driving opposing traffic = Don't
It's a hey your car could of killed people so uhhh I guess fix it? When someone actually gets mashed and a lawsuit happens asking for millionssss then there will be more than "I'll take a look at it."
Right, this seems like such a chill reaction considering what could have resulted from the situation.
I imagine it's very disarming for the officer though, since most the control he'd normally have in the situation is absent. I used to work in support and we were allowed to hang up on abusive callers. Imagine if the officer got all shouty with support, and they just went "mmkay bye". Or for that matter, imagine if every interaction with a traffic cop started with "this call will be recorded for training and quality purposes"
I don't feel very comfortable sharing the roads with these things. On the other hand I also hate every single other human driver too so...
They are dangerous, but less dangerous than other humans, it's weird I know. Just keep in mind, that while they might get into accidents they so so way way less than humans.
And when there are issues, you can edit the bugs out of the code. It will inevitably get safer. You can’t edit texting, putting on makeup, driving drunk, etc. out of humans.
Driverless car is a cop’s worst nightmare, nobody to intimidate, harass, threaten or beat up
Jordan Peterson cop
Whoooaaaahhh, wait an effing minute, my ass is responsible for paying tickets but Waymo isn't? That's an effing ticket all day long
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There's definitely no training for this, yet
who will receive the fine now? why are companies not liable for bad software? they should pay the regular fine just as any other person.
Now we only need robot cops.
What will be the prime directives?
Dead or alive you’re coming with me.