SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill to require human drivers on board self-driving trucks, a measure that union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill to require human drivers on board self-driving trucks, a measure that union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.
Have you never seen the traffic jams caused by these things getting confused and not being able to figure a way out?.. the drivers there so people don’t get stuck behind them for an hour while someone from fuckyoutech comes out to fix it.
No, but I have sat in a traffic jam caused by a human driver who caused a multiple car pile up because they wanted to be slightly ahead.
It’s almost like more than one thing can be bad. Autonomous cars are just a shitty bandaid solution that doesn’t fix the problem.
Exactly. We should instead get autonomous trains, and fix our cities to be train friendly.
Ban all cars. bus, tram and trains need to be so great that you can actually stand driving in them. But they’re only important for winter or when it rains mostly anyway. Otherwise you take the bike, ebike or scooter. We would need to find a solution for carrying lots of groceries obviously. Remember when people hat little trollies behind them when grocery shopping?
(Obviously in summer a disabled person would still ride them. Not trying to be ableist here)
Hard disagree here. Mass transit should win because it’s more convenient, not because it’s the only option.
I’m in favor of car-free zones, rerouting cars around city centers, tolls in busy areas, and in general making car transit less convenient, but it should still be feasible to get where you’re going in a car. The problem is that we’ve made our cities car-centric so mass transit is forced to be inconvenient, and that should be reversed.
But I will never accept banning cars, because that’s how you get the worst of both worlds.
Okay. I agree that i was a bit far with my phrasing. I should have said „in city centers“. I live in a city and I don’t see a reason to use or even own a car 9/10 times (if the transit is good, which it isnt in my city).
But I‘d like to address something else here. If we had no cars, we would take a lot longer to do things and become much less productive and less stressed, which is becoming a big problem rn.
So, maybe a conpromise between both our ideas would be good. I‘d like to achive throwing a wrench in our capitalist steam machine turning our planet to a pile of shit.
I like how Amsterdam does it, check out this video (whole video and channel are worth watching) that discusses how they force cars to go around the city center instead of through it to avoid a lot of conflict with pedestrians.
However, that kind of thinking shouldn’t be exclusive to “city centers,” it should be the default way we plan cities. Make mass transit super effective in the core of the city or town, connect everyone to those hubs, and provide a way to get around and into (but not through) city and town centers via cars so people are encouraged (but not forced) to use mass transit.
Ideally, anyone living in a reasonably densely populated area should be able to get everything they need w/o a car. That should be the goal, and a lot of the solution is to use mixed zoning around transit hubs (i.e. businesses on the ground level, apartments above) and feed into that with roads that connect lower-density areas. The vast majority of your businesses should be close to transit hubs, and the vast majority of your busy roads should be away from city centers.
I don’t think that’s true, and I think you’re looking at things with rose-colored glasses.
200 years ago, most people were subsistence farmers, and that’s around the time that started to end. See this Wikipedia article:
This got worse as the US industrialized in the late 1800s, and people adapted:
These days, starvation isn’t really a thing in the US, and it has been replaced with “food insecurity,” which is more about consistency and quality of food, not whether someone can survive on the amount of food they’re getting. So the stress related to food has improved due to productivity and has been replaced with an economic/distribution issue instead of a production issue.
I could go on about different types of stressors, like risk of death, dangers from natural disasters, etc, but I think I’ve made my point. Increased productivity has made a ton of things better, and we’re now at a life expectancy of >80 years old, compared to leading the world at 51 years old some 250 years ago.
If we look at life 100 years ago, life was hard, and certainly full of stress.
Here are some other interesting links to look at:
These are obviously extreme examples, but my point is that innovations in productivity generally improve peoples’ lifestyles. Even the poorest Americans can travel to the other side of the country and back if they wanted, and most people own smartphones. If we look at today, the stressors are very different from even 50 years ago.
So, would you like to go back to how things used to work? I’m guessing no, but I obviously can’t speak for you.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
check out this video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I‘m a little surprised by the sheer size of your comment. Thank you for your effort.
I agree that there are many good ideas and nuances to use in this situation. I really like how much thought you‘ve put into it.
Where I don’t agree is the 100 yrs ago theme. You‘re taking what I said and interpret it in a way I didn’t intend. I meant we as people should become less productive and neither we as a population nor living like 100 yrs ago.
Example: being less productive as in not being on the phone with a customer while driving to work alone in your own car so as to be there early, able to pick something up your boss demands and making sales for the company but instead waiting for the bus, not being on the phone and not slaving for your boss while on unpaid time.
Does this example make more sense?
And being less productive does not mean we have no modern medicine, cutting edge computers but less luxury. The vast majority of our surplus productivity goes into the 1% and luxury items. Yachts, Jewelry, etc. part of this surplus happens because both people in a 2 person household work and still get along the same or less than 1 earner households did back in the 70s.
Autonomous cars are the only viable solution in the near to mid term. Human drivers are awful. Building out mass-transit and transport infrastructure is a generations-long process and very politically unpopular. Autonomous vehicles will have issues that can only be ironed out in live testing. Which sucks but that’s how all innovations go.
Autonomous cars are decades away from hitting any level of meaningful saturation. Might as well work on the more practical solutions…
What’s more practical? Redesigning all of US’s cities to work without cars? High-speed cross-country rail? Mass transit in every town?
That’s more practical than passing regulations that allow the few companies even attempting automation to test it? This is just a “if it’s not perfect don’t do it” mentality that stops any attempts at progress.
You’re just an angry douche putting words in my mouth. Never said they can’t roll out automated cars. Just said they might as well work on the more practical long term solutions.
Not possible
I live in the land of bad drivers, and long haul truckers almost NEVER cause accidents. The cause is almost always a passenger vehicle, even if a truck is involved. Truckers get trained.
That’s fair, but I was more concerned about an accident being caused where the “driver” has seconds to react to a mistake the car is making. After sitting doing nothing for hours there’s no way they’d be attentive until it’s too late.
They would be more likely to stop the accident from happening if they were there as opposed to not being there.
“More likely” is not likely. Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t be allowed on the road at all.
At the current level of autonomous vehicle abilities, I agree with you, in a broad sense. Vehicles will need to still be able to differentiate between shapes, even during bad weather. Weather like blizzards, sudden downpours, heavy fog, dust storms, and the like. You still have to be able to see to safely pull off of the road.
Until we can guarantee with 100% certainty that they can truly drive without aid, I completely agree that these vehicles would not be safe on their own. Weather is very well known for being unpredictable at times. Life in general is also known for being unpredictable at times.
What happens if the sensors are unknowingly damaged? What happens if someone is wearing a costume that makes them look like a giant cereal box instead of human-shaped? What happens if there’s a software glitch at a bad time? What protections are there to guarantee that it doesn’t happen? Are those protections temporary? How often should they be reviewed?
It should be OK to acknowledge that we aren’t quite there yet. Yes, it seems cool and all, but it’s silly to risk lives over impatience. If it will happen, it will happen. Forcing it to happen sooner than it should could very well lead to it being banned altogether, especially if enough people die or get injured as a result.
IMO, anyone who causes serious crashes from using these things in “fully autonomous” mode should be charged as if the vehicle wasn’t autonomous. As if the accident was caused by sleeping behind the wheel or texting while driving. The company should be charged similarly in that scenario, as their programming and marketing would also play a part in the crash.
Hey, if they’re truly safe, none of these charges would actually happen. If there isn’t an “oops” death in the first place, there won’t be an “oops” death to investigate.
We could just not allow autonomous vehicles.
Ever? What kinda conservative bullshit lol
Not until they’re safe. The tech isn’t there yet.
There’s no reason to bother with autonomous vehicles if we’re just going to have human drivers anyway.
Testing?
Anyone who uses FSD on their Tesla would happily tell you it’s not even close to being safe yet. Hell if anything I’m MORE attentive when using the autopilot because it can be so sketch sometimes.
I doubt you’re more attentive than someone who is literally driving lol
I drive 150-200 miles/day. I’m definitely zoned out for the most of it lol
And zoning out would be much worse with computer assistance!
Actually cars should be abolished for this very reason - humans can never be truly safe drivers, they always get bored and zone out.
Self-driving trucks will never be 100% autonomous. They will need a reliable data connection to a control center so humans can figure out how to deal with exceptional situations.
There will probably be occasional stupid traffic jams until the technology is perfected. As long as they avoid murderous rampages, we should be okay.