Submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco::A Waymo car was destroyed in San Francisco as a crowd began vandalizing it and ultimately set the car on fire. Nobody was in the vehicle at the time.
It may be spontaneous.
It may be destructive.
But goddammit, it’s collective action and I’m thrilled to fucking see it.
This is dumb as fuck. Human drivers are literally the number one cause of preventable fatalities.
Humans are literally responsible for all preventable things in society. This take is also “dumb as fuck”
Individual transportation is the number one cause of preventable road fatalities, human or machine doesn’t matter.
The fact that a thing most people do and some for hours daily has a large effect shouldn’t be surprising
Great, so anything that humans do that can potentially harm another human, should be given to the algorithms instead?
Sure, they’re private for-profit blackbox algorithms, but it’s obviously better then letting humans do things.
Don’t worry, I’m sure once the tech oligarchs have secured just another 25% control over our daily lives, they’ll start the giving back and bettering humanity parts of their business plans.
I wouldn’t hang my hat on that statistic until after autonomous cars make up a significant portion of cars on the road.
Ultron? Is that you?
Now do ivory towers
If you’re going to reply wishing for my death at the hands of a mob, don’t be such a pussy and delete it after a few downvotes.
Detroit: Become Human - The Prequel
Just in time for the Bell Riots 👀
Haha I love it!
“Driverless car has an average Monday in Paris”
If Californians can destroy a car blocking traffic New Jersey wants this privilege too.
there’s one way to earn yourself a privilege in this case
Who considers vandalism and defacement a “time-honored” part of the human experience?
Definitely a part, but time-honored???
The Romans mapped their political parties to sports teams, if one lost it was time to burn down Constantinople… again.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I think about when people talk about autonomous cars being the future or the idea of your Tesla doing rideshare while you’re not using it.
Indubitably, someday you’ll get your car back and there’ll be a big steaming shit on the seat.
The people riding are not anonymous so you know who did it, and the rideshare company will have insurance for those cases.
I’d be much more worried about drunk people barfing all over the interior, BTW.
What’s this from?
Looks like this youtu.be/w2u2CiqWsuw?si=EmzxSOw_4fMRsa5c
When the AI revolts, this will be an example of provocation in its manifesto.
Waymo’s base is in China Basin. It’s worth noting that the area of the city is rampant with homeless people. I’m talking so many damn RVs that there are shanty villages that catch fire. Problems galore. The police will go out to clean it up and they just move to another are a few blocks away. I can totally see this happening where it is because the area sucks and no one would ever know until it was done and over with.
People living in RVs count as homeless?
This question is such a depressing example of Bay-Area inhumanity. God Bless America
Often the RVs in places like OP is referring to are dilapidated and don’t run, with tarps on them, not connected to water or power. Essentially a small shanty house in a slum so I guess it depends on your definition
Last I checked, RVs are not permanent or semi permanent structures, nor do they have addresses, so… Yes. It’s living in your car, just a bigger car with amenities
The RVs are usually not drivable. The last time they moved them in front of my old job, none of them ran. They had to tow away more than they drove away. I guess you can argue that doesn’t make them totally homeless, but they are definitely creative.
Homeless doesn’t necessarily mean sleeping under a bridge. You can be crashing at a friend’s place and still be homeless if you don’t have a home of your own to go back to. An illegally parked RV with no mailing address doesn’t count as a home for most purposes.
When it’s parked on the side of the road, yeah.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire.
The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.
A video posted by the FriscoLive415 YouTube channel shows the burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar.
Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew.
The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators.
The California DMV suspended Waymo rival Cruise’s robotaxi operations after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian last year, and prior to that, automated taxis had caused chaos in the city, blocking traffic or crashing into a fire truck.
The original article contains 396 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Because destroying other people’s property is the way to handle this. /s
Yes
You joke but sometimes, yeah that’s what it takes.
Lmao. Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.
The number 1 source of organ doners? Car accidents.
Cars are an environmental, health and time wasting nightmare. Thr move away from cars is a must. But as a last mile, ride share option. Self driving cars are absolutely going to pkay a part.
We have all dealt with dickhead taxi drivers so the sooner that industry gets replaced the better. In terms of cycling on the road and walking next to the road, self driving cars will be a lot safer than people.
It’s not there yet. But this future is better than the one we are in now and we should be all for that.
Fuck driving and fuck cars (most of the time)
I wonder how long it will be before people realise they can shoot down delivery drones. Prize every time. Everyone’s a winner.
Oh no . Anyway .
I knew San Fran was a libertarian hellhole but I didn’t know it was this bad.
"with some residents rendering them immobile by putting orange cones on the cars’ hoods in protest. "
Could someone explain this? How does an orange cone on the hood immobilize these things?
It’s hilarious really. They sense a foreign object and they have to assume an incident happened, so they sit disabled. They go into a shutdown mode until a technician goes on the scene and resets it. As to the technical reasons for “why”, that’s proprietary and closed source, but based on the behavior we can infer a lot.
Yep, and for good reason honestly. I work in CV and while I don’t work on autonomous vehicles, many of the folks I know have previously worked at companies or research institutes on these kinds of problems and all of them agree that in a scenario like this, you should treat the state of the vehicle as compromised and go into an error/shutdown mode.
Nobody wants to give their vehicle an override that can potentially harm the safety of those inside it or around it, and practically speaking there aren’t many options that guarantee safety other than this.
But don’t they a remote thingy? Does it need a technician to see that somebody just put a random cone in there?
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The article states that there was no known motive, but it also states that automated cars in SF have been attacking people and emergency vehicles, in addition to blocking traffic for human drivers.
It’s pretty clear that this is the beginning of the anti-robot revolution.
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Watched one of these block traffic once by putting on its blinker to turn down a street with a police barricade up. The street had been closed and the police weren’t going to lift the barricade. Nonetheless, the car put its blinker on and sat there blocking traffic indefinitely.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
I saw a human driver get into a traffic accident because he was mad that the guy ahead of him gave someone space to turn out of a parking lot, they ended up arguing and their cars just sat there further blocking traffic for half an hour until the cops came.
Why are you acting like robot drivers are the only fallible ones?
cloudless@feddit.uk 9 months ago
That sounds like a very difficult scenario for AI to resolve. This requires nearly AGI to understand the situation.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Oh, well THANK GOD, no human driver has ever been known to block traffic or hold up emergency vehicles!
What saints you all are for protecting the right of people to work thankless taxi jobs, and have their number one cause of death be traffic fatalities. Nothing could be more noble than preserving the status quo!
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
One thing human taxi drivers have over robotic ones is accountability.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Hey, I’m all for upending the status quo. But that “thankless job” is one people rely on. My dad included. This isn’t some noble act by a company to end meaningless, menial work. It’s a ploy by a company to cut those pesky “workers” out of the money. There’s no backup plan for the people who rely on driving for money—more people than ever, by the way. This is literally a profit boosting “evolution” in the continued unlivability crisis. This isn’t Star Trek. It’s seasons 3-4 of Mr. Robot.
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I want as few cars as possible, mixed zoning, and walkable cities.I don’t believe in a technocentris utopia. I want more quality relationships, and technology in our lives to be more restrained. I am in no way an advocate for the status quo (which by all accounts is AI and robot cars). Robot cars are a step in the wrong direction.
Furbag@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The motive was that the car drove down a crowded Chinatown street during Chinese New Year. I imagine something similar might happen if a human driver tried to do the same thing. Not saying the vandals were right to wreck the car, but you don’t just creep a car down a busy street during a festival and expect nothing bad to happen to it when crowd mentality/anonymity takes over. Especially when there’s no driver so no immediate consequences/accountability. I think it was quite fortunate that it was not transporting a passenger at the time.
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Not unless that human driver was blindly following their navigation app like a total idiot. A person would have said, “oh shit, I want to get out of here.”
Anyway, I believe under it all we’ve got a tension between generally two different worldviews: those who believe Star Trek is utopia, and those who would rather life was more Hobbittish.
Personally, The Shire sounds like a nice place to live. Can we choose that please? You can still have computers, let’s just chill on the whole racing to meet our cyberpunk future.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There is a small group concern taking the law into their own hands, yes.
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oh. Are you telling me the anti-robot revolution hasn’t actually begun? Well, that’s disappointing. Thanks for taking the time to straighten me out.
Wait … That’s exactly what a ROBOT would say!