mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

383K
active users

@arstechnica What’s with the prim disapproval here? This is a feel-good story.

@arstechnica sigh, complaining about the environment and resource distribution and then setting fire to resources does not add up.

And also for what reason? Are they all taxi drivers? Even if so there's plenty better things to set fire to than a random car, I don't see the logic in people doing this, it's just a stupid way to vent anger about a broken system onto things and entities that can't do much about that system itself.

This isn't political, this is just lame vandalism.

@anthropy @arstechnica A bit more context would be nice. If that robot was trying to to drive through a street party I can imagine people would be irritated.

@jeroenvanbergen @arstechnica that I can agree with- though just blocking it from driving through it would've been enough in that case I'd say? Though yea I also don't know the context here, if someone got pushed by it or hit by it I too would've been angry at it being allowed on the roads prematurely in the first place

@anthropy @jeroenvanbergen A few days ago a Waymo vehicle DID hit a cyclist. There were mitigating circumstances and nobody suffered serious injuries, but it happened.

@helianthropy @jeroenvanbergen I wasn't aware, thank you for pointing that out.

I do wonder what happened there, I looked it up and it seems the vehicle missed a cyclist that was following a truck ( electrek.co/2024/02/07/a-waymo ) but did brake heavily and the cyclist got off with minor injuries. I do wonder if the cyclist was using the bike lane that was there, and I wonder if a normal driver would've been able to avoid such accident.. but either way I do hope they improve on that further of course.

Electrek · A Waymo robotaxi hit a cyclist in San Francisco – here’s what happenedAn autonomous Waymo car hit a cyclist in San Francisco – but luckily the cyclist had only minor injuries. Still, it’s bad news for urban cyclists, and for Waymo, which is already having a tough time shaking off the Cruise disaster.

@anthropy @arstechnica "Sigh", which of these folks were complaining about the environment and resource distribution? And what "broken system" is self-driving cars addressing?

@Alligator @arstechnica why did they set it on fire? Again I don't see the logic in this so feel free to elaborate any of that. Also what I was saying is that setting a car or taxi on fire, self driving or otherwise, does not solve anything. Selfdriving cars might be seen as a way to address road raging monkeys if I were to point to anything, it has nothing to do with broken anarchocapitalism or people being out of jobs; it can't fix that even by stopping to exist.

@anthropy @arstechnica there is nothing on any motive in the article, do you know more? Have you any additional Infos or footage etc.(suspecting since you say you are a google'r)? Can you access the footage from the car?

@Zeugs @arstechnica I actually don't know, I don't work for waymo, I'm just a humble datacenter tech, and couldn't access anything. I just see people cheering which makes me angry because I don't think it solves anything and is a wrong way to try and address ..whatever they're trying to address with this

@tang0008 @arstechnica I don't know if they are, but if they are, then this is like taxi drivers setting fire to ubers, or uber drivers setting fire to taxis. It's just a weird destructive way to solve nothing, I wish people would find better ways :/

@anthropy @arstechnica A Waymo car in SF ran into a cyclist a few days before this incident (something none of the articles mention) and in this particular case the car was trying to push through crowds in a packed street, something dangerous that a human taxi driver would not have done.

@anthropy @arstechnica I don’t know whether these things should or shouldn’t be attempting to shove their way through a crowd of people, but apparently that’s what it did.

One of the recurring problems with these types of vehicles is that they do a lot off things they are in principle not supposed to do, like backing over someone (such as what happened with that Cruise taxi that got their license suspended) or freezing in the middle of intersections and such.

@MisuseCase @arstechnica do you have any sources on that? because again I don't know, I can't tell from the Ars article alone, it just says 'the fireworks started' and 'people closed it in and started to vandalize it', I don't see anything about it bumping or pushing into people or through crowds, it just seems like people closed it in on purpose while it was waiting.

And as much as I agree they need further improvement, I wonder about the numbers of accidents compared to actual humans ... 🤷

@MisuseCase @arstechnica none of those explain what happened to this specific incident above though, and I already linked the SF incident..

I do much agree the Cruise incident is very unfortunate and they shouldn't have been allowed on the road with something like that possible in the first place- but I still very much trust robotaxis more than I do roadraging monkeys, as much as I agree it's fun to drive a car-- if anything that's why I think that.

@anthropy @arstechnica You shouldn’t trust robotaxis because one of the things you depend on is for other vehicles on the road to behave predictably and robotaxis have a tendency to behave in peculiar ways that a human driver never would.

@MisuseCase @arstechnica right, blocking me is one way to end an argument I guess 🤷 I'm sorry if I offended, but in my defense, it didn't seem like a very constructive debate free of logical fallacies to begin with.

I just hope these things will keep improving, rather than being set on fire, which will fix absolutely nothing.

@anthropy @arstechnica The question isn’t really “do the robotaxis have fewer accidents than human drivers,” it’s “ would human drivers have had these issues that the robotaxis are having, which are really bizarre, disruptive, and dangerous to surrounding pedestrian and vehicle traffic” and the answer is almost always no, a human driver wouldn’t have screwed up in this particular way.

@MisuseCase @arstechnica I think they're both valid questions, and I again very much agree that these things need further improvement, but I also think the safety track record of these things is better than humans, and will only further improve, to the point they are just objectively better at driving than humans in every possible way, even if of course we are still in the infancy phase of these things and weird shit happens- but trust me, humans have backed into other humans on plenty occasions

@anthropy @arstechnica A human in that situation would not have backed over that woman and dragged her 20 feet but the driverless car did.

I don’t think the argument that the driverless car is better than a human-operated car is compelling if it frequently behaves in dangerous and unpredictable ways that a human driver wouldn’t.

@arstechnica One man's vandals are another man's freedom fighters

@arstechnica "It's mostly just a question of if the company wants to press charges", haha.

I wonder if you can find a jury in SF who'd convict anyone of stopping a robot car from driving through a street party.

@arstechnica yeah this is actually awesome glad no humans were harmed.

@arstechnica we don’t need more robots cabs. next!

@arstechnica Setting fire to a vehicle is a radically anti-environmental, wasteful act. Watching people cheer this on is weird and gross.

@arstechnica You want rise of the machines this is how you get rise of the machines

@arstechnica not all Luddism is entirely unjustified.

@arstechnica This is one story where taking the time to actually investigate what is happening, instead of taking the word of some random corporation at face value, would be worth the effort.

If half the stuff I've heard 2nd hand is true Waymo has been on very thin ice with the San Fran public for a while now. This was a matter of when, not if.

@beeoproblem @arstechnica what are the reasons?

If a driverless car tried to move through a large crowd: that would be a reason. But this I do not know from whats in the sources I read, in this case.

I heard little about automated cab behavior in general only about some crashes.

@arstechnica "untimely" sorry am I supposed to feel sad about this? I'm thrilled.

@arstechnica
Hey Ars, you mispelled "Citizens" in the headline.

@arstechnica Didn't we recently learn that there are no "autonomous" cars driving in SF? The company actually has real drivers remotely stepping in when it encounters a problem, and they STILL tried to drive through a street party?

@arstechnica "Multi-ton robot tried to push through a crowd, so they disabled it to prevent anyone from being injured or killed." Fixed that for you.

@jef @arstechnica A *second* multi-ton robot from what I read somewhere (forget if it was the Ars comments or fedi)

@arstechnica here's hoping the rest of the fleet meets a simmilar end before they run more people over.

@arstechnica will AI note this as the 1st ‘unprovoked’ attack on robots by humans?