> we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them.
You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.
In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result.
Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.
That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions.
It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).
Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year...
I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.
"I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen"
OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of.
"further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths"
This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional.
Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths.
And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.
Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.
Because failure to solve it is political and intellectual laziness and cowardice.
It's like jets falling out of the sky because the guy that bolts the wings on is only half doing his job, we can all see it and know about it and yet.. nobody wants to speak up.
I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?
Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).
I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:
There are ways, but our individualistic, consumerist, convenience-first society is reluctant to implement them - as, same as gun control, they're incompatible with certain notions of freedom.
> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers that autonomous driving is capable of reaching past.
It's tragic, but people die on roads every day, all that changes is accountability gets muddier and there's a chance things might improve every time something goes wrong.
But other countries have far fewer accidents than the US so it isn't quite so black and white. The gain from autonomous vehicles will be much less in the UK for instance.
If you really want to reduce accident rates you need to improve road design and encourage more use of public transport and cycling. This requires no new vehicles, no new software, no driver training, and doesn't need autonomous vehicles at all.
But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.
It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough
Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safer
> But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.
Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong.
In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.
Being unable to abort a flight with a moment's notice does add complication, but not so much that flying is "a lot more complicated" than driving. The baseline for cars is very hard. And cars also face significant trouble when stopping. A hell of a lot can go wrong with either.
a bit unclear from my statement before but that's the point. Something that feels easy is actually much more complicated than that. Like weather, runway condition, plane condition, wind speed / direction, ongoing incidents at airport, etc. Managing all that scenario is not easy.
the similar things also applied in driving, especially with obstacles and emergency, like floods, sinkhole in Bangkok recently, etc.
Flying is the “easy” part. There’s a lot more wood behind the arrow for a safe flight. The pilot is (an important) part of an integrated system. The aviation industry looks at everything from the pilot to the supplier of lightbulbs.
With a car, deferred or shoddy maintenance is highly probable and low impact. With an aircraft, if a mechanic torques a bolt wrong, 400 people are dead.
At least one reason for intentionally not having fully autonomous flying is that you want the human pilots to keep their skills sharp (so they are available in case of an emergency).
Also, humans will intentionally act counter to regulations just to be contrarian or send a message. Look at “rolling coal”, or people who race through speed meters to see if they can get a big number. Or recently near me they replaced a lane to many a dedicated bus lane, which is now a “drive fast to pass every rule follower” lane.
For some reason law enforcement seem to be particularly reluctant to deal with this kind of overtime dumbfuckery when it involves automobiles.
If you try something equivalent with building regs or tax authorities, they will come for you. Presumably because the coal-rolling dumbasses are drawn from the same social milieu as cops.
Planes maintain vertical and lateral separation away from literally everything. Autonomy is easier in relatively controlled environments, navigating streets is more unlike flying than it is similar.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.
Waymo operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta so I am sure they encountered school buses by now and learned from those encounters.
This is actually the one technology I am excited about. Especially with the Zoox/mini bus /carpool model, I can see these things replacing personal cars entirely which is going to be a godsend for cost, saftey and traffic
If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good.
Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe.
What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.
I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways
We don't even try. In the US you demonstrate that you know the rules at one point in time and that's it, as long as you never get a DUI you're good.
For instance, the 2003 California Driver's Handbook[1] first introduced the concept of "bike lanes" to driver education, but contains the advice "You may park in the bike lane unless signs say “NO PARKING.”" which is now illegal. Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed.
It also lacks any instruction whatsoever on common modern roadway features like roundabouts or shark teeth yield lines, but we still consider drivers who only ever studied this book over 20 years ago to be qualified on modern roads.
Some places will dismiss a traffic ticket if you attend a driver's education class to get updates, though you can only do this once every few years. So at least there have been some attempts to get people to update their learning.
> No amount of crashing results in traffic school, just certain kinds of tickets.
Well, sufficient at-fault crashing will suspended your license, and among other requirements for restoring the license may be traffic school, DUI school, or some other program depending on the reason for suspension, so this is not strictly correct. You can't use optional voluntary traffic school to clear points from a collision from your record BEFORE getting a suspension the way you can with minor moving violations without a collision, but that doesn’t mean collisions won’t force you into traffic school.
Which states/counties/cities? IME that rarely happens, tickets are often used for revenue-raising. And some recent laws e.g. 2008, 2009, 2025 CA cellphone use laws cannot be discharged by traffic school, AFAIK.
> Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed.
That's silly. People become aware of new laws all the time without having to attend a training course or read an updated handbook.
I took the CA driver's written test for the first time in 2004 when I moved here from another state. I don't recall whether or not there was anything in the handbook about bike lanes, but I certainly found out independently when it became illegal to park in one.
I don't doubt that many people are aware of many of the new laws. But I strongly suspect that a very significant number of drivers are unaware of many new laws.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.
I haven't dealt with a school bus in....maybe 20 years, and it would definitely be an exception if I had to deal with one tomorrow. I kind of know what I should do, but it isn't instinct at this point.
A waymo, even if it drove in urban Seattle for 20 years where school buses aren't common, it would know what to do if it was presented with the exception tomorrow (assuming it was trained/programmed correctly), it wouldn't forget.
You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.