Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting

xvxvx

We continue to inch closer to these dumb buckets costing someone their life. Hell, they may already have.

4d4m

Wild! Who wrote legislation to allow this?

prhn

At the risk of sounding ignorant, why didn't the various police cruisers and even the ambulance itself just push the damn thing out of the way? That's what the push bars attached to the front of their vehicles are for.

mxfh

Cars block the street all the time, there is ample place to pass the waymo car on the left in the opposing lane, yet those SUV driving humans don't care to move out of the way either, and police just blocks the maneuver area too. That silver car in the front could also just pass in front and make space. Situational awareness has room to be improved for a lot of entities in this short video. Nueces Street is 3 and half lanes wide there plus massive sidewalks, apparently to narrow for even more massive ambulances. https://maps.app.goo.gl/74jF9iDUCXmm9jVE7

dangero

The problem we will encounter with self driving cars is that while they will make less mistakes than humans, they will make different mistakes. Humans will continue to have a hard time accepting this tradeoff. I live in LA where Waymos are now on every street. My experience is that they don’t respect human courtesy, so for example if I need to cross a lane of busy traffic, a human may brake as a courtesy to let me through. Waymos have fucked me over where a human probably would have shown some level of community and empathy.

orliesaurus

This is my town, wow - cant believe someone filmed this whole interaction while there was a shooting a couple of blocks from there... If the ambulance was in a hurry they could have rammed the Waymo, I am sure Google wouldn't have sued for damages. AFAIK when a Waymo detects emergency vehicle lights and sirens, it is designed to pull over and stop, unlock its doors, and roll down its windows. Also: First responders can put the vehicle into a manual mode to move it if needed.

comrh

Isn't it making an illegal u-turn over a double yellow line?

KennyBlanken

I've never understood why everyone acts like this is some bizarre legal quagmire. If I make a robot and it goes and kills someone, nobody sits around navel gazing wondering how they're going to prosecute a robot. If I make a device that pulls the trigger of a gun aimed at someone tied to a chair when I click a button on my cell phone, or something green appears in the camera attached to the device, or time reaches 11:24:42pm - nobody sits around navel gazing wondering how they're going to prosecute an electronic device. In both cases, I would be prosecuted . These cars are robots. They are designed, constructed, programmed, and monitored/supervised by humans. The humans are responsible for anything the robots do that cause damage, violate civil regulations, or criminal laws. The solution here is very simple. Seize all the corporate email records, code, etc. and charge everyone involved in the production of the code that caused the "behavior", along with anyone whose negligence in supervision or review failed to catch the defect, or anyone who knew the car would or could do what it did, and failed to blow the whistle or failed to stop the car hitting the road. Maybe then SV will stop "beta testing" fatal devices on the general public.

orliesaurus

Someone on Austin's subreddit said the following and I think it's the correct take/lens: > I might get downvoted for expressing my feelings but whatever. I hate seeing my coworkers being ridiculed for simply doing the right thing and moving on with their work. I’ve been abused and called an idiot on here for stating our reality. I’m a paramedic. We will NOT attempt to move or hit a vehicle, person, or object to go to a call or transport a patient. Especially if there’s an option for an alternate route. People cut us off, don’t move, flick us off, and generally don’t regard us even with our lights and sirens on. Is it frustrating? Absolutely. Do we like it? Hell no. But getting in trouble or under investigation for a collision or possibly causing unnecessary harm simply isn’t worth it. I know this was high profile, tragic, and absolutely dire. But you have to remember, we live this everyday and this is not the first time a vehicle, object, or person has gotten in this paramedic or EMTs way and it won’t be the last. Don’t even get me started on the amount of verbal abuse and assaults we deal with. This is a very hard job and we are under constant scrutiny but I promise you we try and do our very best every day. So please do us a favor next time you see us out on the streets and give us some grace.

dzhiurgis

where's the lidar bois now?

himata4113

Everyone is downvoted in the comments 80% are grey? Even the ones that sound perfectly reasonable? Upvoted one and it was still greyed out which makes me think there's more to it, but maybe I am missing something really obvious.

escapegoat

My kneejerk, not thought through notion: why not require an emergency override protocol be builtin to road using robots? No thoughts on how this would work exactly, but it would let emergency workers move robot vehicles out of the way.

ekianjo

I thought Lidar solved everything?

Janicc

This comment section surely would look the same if it had been a Tesla, right?

UltraSane

The neat thing about self driving fleets is that when you fix a issue like this ALL the cars start driving better.

tim-tday

First responders need the ability to say get the fuck out of here, don’t come back, tell your friends.

small_model

Another example of Waymo betting wrong, lots of expensive sensors vs Tesla with cameras and NN trained on billions of real miles (i.e. human like autonomy). A Tesla would have moved as it's trained to recognise this situation.

paganel

The tech-bros never learn any humility, we have here an actual example of one of their hellish AI darlings blocking the first responders in their way to the aftermath of a terrorist attack, and what do those tech-bros' do? They continue supporting their hellish AI darling. Ellul was always right about things.

reenorap

I was using Tesla Summon in my car parking lot. It had pulled out of the spot and started to turn to leave the spot when a truck entered the row. My Tesla couldn’t move because of the truck and I couldn’t do anything else so it was a deadlock. Normally if a person was caught in this situation they would have just parked back into the spot or reverse and straighten out but it had already started moving forward so I guess it just froze instead of reacting and there was no option to park back to get out of the way and unblock. Sure the truck could have pulled out but I think the guy was confused why the car was moving with someone in there and just stayed where he was. Luckily the range of Summon isn’t very far so I ran over, apologized and took control of the car but it just goes to show how many real edge cases there are in real life and software can’t account for many of them.