Cruise CEO says SF ‘should be rolling out the red carpet’ for robotaxis, threatens to maybe leave town::In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said “we cannot expect perfection” from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further.
We demand perfection in a lot of fields, and we are a hell of a lot closer to it than the wild west of AI alphas we have driving around.
Aviation, Medical, Space Travel…etc…
We can get to extreme levels of quality when lives are at risk. Driverless cars put lives at risk.
Humans are a terribly low bar to use for a quality measure. Also, a human will (usually) do it’s best to mitigate damage in am accident
In the case of Tesla…fuck it…I’m going through that parked semi at 80mph.
None of those fields have achieved perfection. Airplanes crash, people die in hospitals and space shuttles. If anything, computer assistance has managed to make those safer than before.
If (when) robotcars are safer than human drivers, less people will die in traffic accidents. It’s not a perfect bar to settle on, but it’s better then the current standard.
Again, denying improvements, because it’s less than perfect is just insane.
Denying “improvements” that cost innocent bystanders their life is the only responsible choice.
I was game for the great experiment 10 years ago. But the tech just hasn’t gotten better, and arguably is worse today.
It’s time to say enough is enough and restrict driverless tech to controlled areas.
Being simply better than the average human isn’t enough here.
I never said better than the average driver, I said better than human drivers (preferably by a long shot).
So let’s say that means… Better than 90% of all drivers. That isn’t going to cost lives, it’s going to save them. Not to mention improve traffic flow.
Unlikely…to make an AI car safer than 90% than human drivers means it will respect the speed limit.
That alone causes traffic jams and unsafe conditions around the car as people try to get around it.
A human driver will somewhat go with the flow of traffic.
An AI vehicle just won’t work until it’s a nearly perfect driver that can make human decisions.
That’s not going to happen for a long time. Musk, with his revolving door of low cost engineers is actually making it all worse.
Pull the plug on this experiment and put it back on the test track.