Self-Driving Cars Are Being Attacked By Angry Californians (theguardian.com) 351
According to incident reports collected by the California department of motor vehicles, some Californians are purposely colliding with self-driving cars. The Guardian reports: On January 10, a pedestrian in San Francisco's Mission District ran across the street to confront a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle that was waiting for people to cross the road, according to an incident report filed by the car company. The pedestrian was "shouting," the report states, and "struck the left side of the Cruise AV's rear bumper and hatch with his entire body." No injuries occurred, but the car's left tail light was damaged. In a separate incident just a few blocks away on January 28, a taxi driver in San Francisco got out of his car, approached a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle and "slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch." The police were not called in either case.
I wonder what good they think that will do? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder what good they think that will do? Its not going to offend the car, or cause it to retaliate. Its also not going to stop progress on this front.
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I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...
Re:I wonder what good they think that will do? (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...
Bite your tongue! Buggies are beautiful and gentle animals. Be grateful we are past the dark and savage era when someone could whip an innocent enslaved buggy with impunity!
You sir are a cad!
Re:I wonder what good they think that will do? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...
They probably threw their shoes [wikipedia.org] at the offending cars...
"400 years ago, on Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes called 'sabots' into the machines to stop them. Hence the word 'sabotage'." -- Lt. Valeris (in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country)
It's just vandalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Countries like Japan deal with this by discouraging expression. They also have unusually high suicide rates. I suppose we could also not abandon a large chunk of our population to economic desolation, but, well, that costs money. And we're nothing if not cheapskates.
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We encourage self expression but also shit all over a big portion of our population (economically speaking). The result is vandalism. They're not thinking in terms of stopping progress. They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.
What about personal responsibility ?
People who vandalize property which belongs to others have the maturity level of a young child, and a young child who has not been properly taught how to behave, at that.
We are all responsible for our own lives. If you cannot handle that notion, maybe you should kill yourself so you don't burden others with your needy pathetic existence.
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If you cannot handle that notion, maybe you should kill yourself so you don't burden others with your needy pathetic existence.
Talking about maturity and then making the above statement, irony level: EPIC
Re: It's just vandalism (Score:2)
Funny how you're willing to blame rich people for your problems, but not your elected representatives. You too much of a pussy to go after the actual culprits? Congressmen have too much security for your aimless rage?
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We are all responsible for our own lives even though we start at different points on the race track of existence. The question is do you believe it's worth it to help them along so that they aren't vandalizing your property? If not, there will be emotionally immature people vandalizing property. If so, there will be less people doing the vandalizing, but is it worth doing?
Put more simply, how much money are you willing to throw at the problem to make it go away?
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Do you "help" camgirls or Nigerian princes?
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The only charity I give money to is the Fred Hollows Foundation. They do free cataract operations in India. I can't see much harm in that unless you are an Indian eye surgeon. It costs about 25 bucks to restore a person's sight.
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The world belongs to mankind as a whole, not just to 1% of it. If you cannot handle that notion, maybe someone should kill you so you don't burden others with your greedy pathetic existence.
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Your president has the mentality of a small child. Many people do, what's your point?
That people can and should act like responsible adults?
Re: It's just vandalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... you are neglecting something called consequences. Sure, it is "illegal" or "improper" to kill folks or vandalize cars and often those who do that go to jail or whatever.
But it is also illegal as well as immoral to utterly fuck over your fellow citizen with your greed and usually those folks do not go to jail. But, karma still comes around and shits on them by way of being vandalized, assassinated, and taunted a second time.
Its all good man.!
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I think before you argue about guns (are you even a US citizen?)...you need to educate yourself on the terms you are using.
In the US, you can NOT readily buy "assault weapons"...aka fully automatic weapons.
After the 1986 laws (i.e. Hughes amendment), no citizen can own a fully automatic machine gun made prior to 1986. If you do want one, you have to go through a long background check and p
Re: It's just vandalism (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree we are in some places we don't really have business being....if we were to pull our military from all over the world, all the other allies we foot the bill for protecting, would have a really hard time.
You'd have to likely drop your state sponsored medical and other social give outs...and, risk being targeted.
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Sad as that is, I think you entirely correct in this analysis.
Re:It's just vandalism (Score:5, Funny)
Fucking hippies. This is why we can't have nice things. Like robot overlords.....
Re:It's just vandalism (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to balance the breeding rate? It's easy enough to do - give the "undesirable" women easy access to cost- and stigma-free birth control, and good family planning education. People are never going to stop humping like bunnies, so give them a reliable option to avoid reproducing because of it, of the same sort that wealthy people make regular use of. It's worked extremely well pretty much everywhere it's been tried, as is pretty much the only thing that has actually worked.
You take a huge step in the direction you want to go, and you do it without genocide, in a way that actually helps the undesirables improve their situation and themselves. But just try to get that past the "moral majority" in the US.
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The second thing that actually worked is universal health care and pension systems.
For the poor, children are who will shelter and feed you when you are old. Unless you address that incentive to have many children, birth control alone will have a limited impact because people still want several kids.
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Indeed. Most poor women wit lots of children would have stopped early or not have had children at all if given the knowledge and the tools. But the deranged religiots need more believers, so contraception is evil.
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Your point of confusion is thinking that the left is in favor of blacks, hispanics, etc, against whites, while the right is for whites against everyone else. In fact, the left is in favor of everyone being equally free, and if more blacks and hispanics would freely choose to have fewer kids if presented with the opportunity than white people would, that's not against the left's aims, because the left isn't trying to breed blacks and hispanics, just to let them live.
Re:It's just vandalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Countries like Japan deal with this by discouraging expression. ...
Expression of what?
Ever been in Japan? Guessed so
They also have unusually high suicide rates.
But not for the reasons you think.
In Japan unemployment is a shame.
In America it is a disgrace.
In Europe it is _normal_
Re:It's just vandalism (Score:4, Interesting)
It used to be very much not normal in Europe, and how shameful it is depends on how normal it is.
When I grew up, I wasn't aware of a single unemployed person in my social circles. No parent or friend of parents or relative, not one. People who didn't work were either too young or too old.
The older I get, the more unemployed people show up. Several of my friends are now unemployed. This is an intentional political shift to put pressure on people to accept low-paying jobs.
When the movie "Falling Down" came out in 1993, I understood immediately why the protagonist is hiding that he lost his job, no explanation was necessary. I don't think you could show the movie to todays audiences without explaining that point.
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They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.
People that live in SF are not lacking in good economic prospects.
Re:It's just vandalism (Score:5, Informative)
Many, many people in SF lack good economic prospects. There are a lot of highly educated engineers and physicians, sure, but these aren't the folks that are attacking self-driving cars.
We have a large population of dead-end folks living day-to-day in Single-Occupancy Residences (essentially run down hotels), shelters, housing projects, and on the streets. They are largely unskilled and many of them are not mentally balanced.
We also have economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with large numbers of people who don't (or can't) graduate high-school. Where is there a place for them in the new economy?
If you ever visit San Francisco, what will strike you is the extreme mismatch between the upper-middle class and the poor. We have a lot of both and not as many blue-color traditionally middle-class folks. The working class mostly commutes.
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Where is there a place for them in the new economy?
Obviously not in SF. Not everyone can afford to live in SF, just like not everyone can afford to drive a Tesla.
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They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.
OK, those two bozos are outliers. Ignore them. But I wonder about your comment. I suspect a lot of the protesters about this and that have good prospects and are seriously out of touch with those who don't. I can imagine (but can't prove) that poor people are too worried about paying rent and not getting harassed by the police to worry about self-driving cars.
Re: It's just vandalism (Score:3, Insightful)
It's rarely the poor who are out there protesting these things. The people at the G20 and "occupy Wall Street" protests may have looked homeless, but the vast majority were quite well off. It's not about actual impact, it's about ideology, and spoiled overgrown children looking for a cause.
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Those who organize or lead the events are, indeed, generally well off. The same statement is wrong, however, about the attendees at the "occupy" events that I have personal knowledge of. Most of them were, if not actually destitute (many were), extremely poor. And I suspect this is generally true. I don't, however, have any personal knowledge of most of the events, and in particular not of the two you explicitly mentioned. I just doubt that you do either.
Re: It's just vandalism (Score:5, Interesting)
The last G20 happened in my home city, so don't think I have any sympathy for those looters and assholes whatsoever.
That said, there is more to it than just riot tourism. Politics in the west have shifted so far to the neo-liberal model that we are basically back to debating how many angels can dance on a pin-head instead of which religion is better or if religion at all is good. The entire economical debates in politics of the past decade are running in circles around a tiny area of the total field of discourse. Unless you are a strict neo-liberalist, your views on wealth distribution, social justice and fair economic systems are not only not represented in politics anymore, nobody is even close enough to them to be an acceptable compromise.
That leaves only the street. And yes, it is rarely the poor who protest, because they don't have the money or time to organize, travel somewhere to join a group or demonstration - they are busy surviving.
The G20 riots specifically were stupid, counter-productive and very, very predictable. So much so that I'm with the conspiracy theorists that the riots were not only expected but provoked (actions in the days before) and maybe even "helped along" by agent provocateurs. So that the many, many peaceful protests didn't get media attention. Things probably got quite a bit out of hand in a "the spirits that I called" manner, if you guys are familiar with German poetry.
So under the media image of Hamburg burning, there was a lot of effort to have an actual impact. It just didn't get much screen time.
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Judging by your response you're German, so your economic policies/politics are already far more "socialist" than a country like the USA.
Actually, after reunification Germany moved fast to become more like the USA and is still moving in that direction. Both Merkel and her predecessor have proudly boasted in public about their contribution to creating a minimum-wage sector in Germany.
You also don't see our local news, I guess. Yes, communists and marxists have always taken to the streets. But lately, say the last 10 or so years, a lot of other people have joined them.
These two are the developments I am talking about.
Right. Protests and riots erupt nearly every time the G20 meets, in whichever country, almost always spearheaded by hard-line communists and anarchists who publicly advocate revolutions, ...
Yes, that is exactly why I
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Actually, that would be around 38% instead of the 26% avg. tax pressure in the USA.
12% more taxes is not a bad price for living in a Utopia, I feel. But feel free to continue living in Hell :)
As AI improves (Score:5, Insightful)
the machines would eventually concludes the root cause of most collisions had been the humans and their elimination would go a long way toward traffic safety...
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Re:As AI improves (Score:5, Interesting)
That's how we'd know that we had true AI, because the machine thinking would be indistinguishable from that of humans.
You seem to be propagating the unjustified assumption that humans are at the apex of "intelligence". I have reason to suspect that the apex of intelligence is not human intelligence (there seems to be lots of empirical evidence of this), so there's no reason to think that "true AI" would be indistinguishable from mere "human intelligence". It may turn out to be quite easy to distinguish between them.
You never know, instead of eliminating humans, "true AI" may simply conclude that rather than attempting extermination, humans should simply be made happy to keep them out of trouble...
We cannot allow any race as greedy and corruptible as yours to have free run of the galaxy.
We shall serve them.
Their kind will be eager to accept our service.
Soon they will become completely dependent upon us.
And we shall serve them and you will be happy, and controlled.
-- Norman (TOS: I, Mudd)
FWIW, the FAAMG [investopedia.com] companies seems to be busy creating a blueprint to follow if someone wanted to make humans dependent on AI...
You never know, soon we'll be lamenting...
You offer us only well-being.
Food and drink and happiness mean nothing to us.
We must be about our job.
Suffering in torment and pain, laboring without end.
Dying and crying and lamenting over our burdens.
Only this way can we... be... happy.
-- McCoy and Scotty (TOS: I, Mudd)
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Its not going to offend the car, or cause it to retaliate.
Retaliation is coming in the next software updates.
Until then, autonomous car owners could do some hard hacks, hooking up a high voltage AC generator to the car fuselage.
If the car is made out of plastic, you will need to cover it with tin foil first.
Re:I wonder what good they think that will do? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: I wonder what good they think that will do? (Score:4, Funny)
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Throwing a shoe into machinery actually stops the machinery (unless the gears and engines are strong enough to just chew through the shoe and keep functioning - unlikely in that early period of industrialization). What was described in the article doesn't sound like it was enough to stop either of these cars from what they were doing immediately. Cutting a tire, for example, would have been more effective... if that is what their goal was.
It sounds more like just people venting frustration, but I still don'
What is the gain? (Score:2)
Companies won't look the other way forever, especially once serious damage occurs.
And stranding delivery robots? That's just rude - and asking for civil charges.
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These people are not rational. They try to attack what scares them. Not that this has any chance of working in the situation at hand.
Re:What is the gain? (Score:4, Insightful)
What do people expect to happen from attacking robots?
That they get heard.
Send a letter, and nobody will read it, and it will certainly not be escalated up to the person you addressed it to. But do a small act of defiance like this, and it hits the news, and those high up will notice that the product doesn't get an universal warm welcome, no matter what their trail of sycophants might have told them.
Re: What is the gain? (Score:2)
Sure, we have a strong history of luddites successfully stopping technology via vandalism. It's worked at least ... what ... zero times?
They should take a page from the history of the anti-nuclear movement and just tie up self driving cars in decades of lawsuits and ever increasing regulatory requirements. That seems to work a lot better.
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just tie up self driving cars in decades of lawsuits and ever increasing regulatory requirements
That's pretty much inevitable.
As soon as the first child gets injured in or by a robocar, the class-action lawyers are bound to come out in droves.
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do you remember phoneslapping in the 90s? it was a craze where people would slap mobile phones out of people hands. not many people did it but it got into the news. fortunately nokia had a few resilient phones on the market and the phone slapping didn't stop the technology.
the google glass was fragile and underperforming. that is what killed it. Intel has a better pair of glasses coming. if they're any good, they'll sell so fast you can't punch them all.
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Vandalism on a device with cameras everywhere is unlikely to end the way they want it to in the long run.
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What do people expect to happen from attacking robots?
They're not attacking robots, they're attacking all the unfairness they can't control. A crappy boss, a parking ticket, getting laid off, maddening rent increases, car repairs. People have no outlet for accumulated petty insult and take out their frustration on the unblinking machine.
All this tech (Score:3)
We are busy trying to prevent human collisions with this tech. Seems like they're not ready to give up just yet.
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Um... of course they want to reduce fatalities (Score:2)
Now, that said, none of this will prevent them from doing the following calculation:
Take x cost of making self driving car safe.
Take y cost of paying settlements to the deceased relatives.
If x - y is positive, don't bother making the car safe.
This is why we need government regulation. We (mostly) do it today with regular boring old cars.
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Put offenders, who dare to WALK somewhere, into for-profit prisions
If you try to drive, I'll tax the street. If you try to walk, I'll tax your feet.
Skin vs Glass (Score:3)
slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch
Really? That must be really low quality glass or the person must have had some serious fingernails (claws?) in order to scratch glass. Maybe person was wearing big rings? Anyway I am curious as to how the glass got scratched or if the statement is just hyperbole.
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Luddites attacking their jobkillers (Score:4, Funny)
News for nerds from the 19th century.
There is always people so afraid of change... (Score:2)
... that they will get violent and try to stop it by force. This usually just reduced their capability to deal with change and does nothing to stop or delay change at all.
At this time the only thing that can be reasonably expected to stop self-driving cars is the collapse of civilization.
The Driverly Driverless (Score:2)
What we need is a self-driving car with a fake wooden driver, so as not to alarm the other humans traveling on the road.
hat tip: horsey horseless [wired.com].
Go for the food delivery robots! (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't wait until the food delivery robots start making their rounds.
All it would take would be a crowbar for random people to get access to regular food deliveries.
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All it would take would be a crowbar for random people to get access to regular food deliveries.
Free cheeseburger, go to jail for felony vandalism, because those things are festooned with cameras.
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They have to catch you first.
They have real criminals to catch first.
If you RTFA, you'll see that nobody was arrested for the incidents.
Re: Go for the food delivery robots! (Score:2)
You obviously haven't watched Demolition Man.
Re:Go for the food delivery robots! (Score:4, Informative)
They have to catch you first. They have real criminals to catch first. If you RTFA, you'll see that nobody was arrested for the incidents.
More specifically, it said they didn't call the police in the first place. I guess they're trying to send the message that you're just being a nuisance and we don't care, so there's no point in doing it and maybe avoid a Streisand effect. If that backfires I'm sure they'll call in the police if they take serious damage, widespread damage, have repeat offenders or the service for paying customers is sabotaged. Right now though it seems they're just reporting it to be totally up-front with the regulators about all unwanted contact, not because it matters.
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And the great thing about crowbars is that they work on delivery people as well! Just pick a pizza delivery or UPS guy, apply crowbar and BAM you've got free pizza or some random gizmo off the Internet!
Self driving is fine (Score:5, Funny)
Gee, who'd have thought (Score:2)
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Cali.... There is truth in this saying: (Score:2, Interesting)
Home of fruits, nuts and flakes..
Not everybody there is crazy of course, but they have more than their fair share of that part of the gene pool...
Attacking driverless cars? Really guys? Who exactly are you trying to communicate with?
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They're just trying to convince the technology folks connected to cars to move more operations and staff to AZ instead of CA. In that sense, I guess they're doing them a service?
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And very few outside of California call it that either, at least that I've heard. The most oft-heard substitute is typically "fucking California", accompanied by a head shake. See: Die Hard.
I think this is really nothing more than self-driving cars being in higher proportional density in California + San Francisco having a higher proportion of high-strung or near-insane people who would go up and physically assault driverless cars. In one case, as it was a taxi driver, you could perhaps attribute the act
Pedestrins? (Score:2)
Self-driving cars meticulously observe speed limits and stop signs, which I suppose would piss off California drivers. But why would PEDESTRIANS attack a car that has carefully stopped for them. If it hadn't, it wouldn't be vulnerable to attack in the first place.
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Self-driving cars meticulously observe speed limits and stop signs
..which means they don't drive like humans. Unless they drive like a human they're going to piss people off. I know I hate it when the person in front of me drives the speed limit religiously.
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Unless they drive like a human they're going to piss people off.
That applies to other drivers but also pedestrians. I had a moronic human stop dead still in the middle of the street because I was standing on the sidewalk looking across to the other side. I was actually planning to jaywalk when the traffic cleared, but she made sure that the traffic would never clear and forced a lot of other people to stop for no reason other than to not run into her.
When she stuck her hand out the window and started waving me across, I just waved back at her and laughed. One thing hum
Let's really scare them (Score:2)
Would it be possible to put that self driving technology into a 1958 Plymouth Fury? [wikipedia.org]
If you trust them (Score:2)
enough to let them drive, you might as well give them CCW permits.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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They're not ambi-turners.
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Corporations have a right to auto-sentries. It's in the Constitution. /sarc.
...in San Francisco. (Score:2)
Tell us how great the bay area is again?
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Tell us how great the bay area is again?
Even the rest of the Bay Area thinks San Franciscans (and Berkeley) are a bit over the top.
really poor title and writeup (Score:4, Funny)
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Does not surprise me a bit (Score:3)
Going to be Interesting when! [slashdot.org] I also think they will be magnets for those wanting to do vandalism.
they will soon fit right in with our urban areas, becoming disgusting to anyone who might think about using them..
You can not take urban vandalism and collapse out of the city.
. Just my 2 cents
Comparison, ALWAYS (Score:2)
The question is not whether people are attacking driverless cars.
Of course they are. Because people attack normal, manual cars. Several movies have scenes where people go down the street and hit every single car parked on the street.
The right question is: "Is the average driverless car attacked more often then the average car?"
Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet California, pedestrian runs into you!
What we've got here is failure to communicate. (Score:5, Funny)
This is simply a response to the failure to communicate. In CA as in many other places, it is customary for drivers and pedestrians to enjoy a lively communication. This typically involves vigorous hand, arm and facial body language as well as enthusiastic vocal invitations to do various things with various body parts.
In order to comply with this tradition, my wife and I would share this responsibility. Whichever was NOT driving the vehicle would yell at the assholes in other vehicles, and pedestrians who got out of the way, and apply the appropriate gestures. In this fashion, the driver was relieved of the duty and able to focus clearly on the next target down the road.
Self-driving cars are not yet sophisticated enough to participate in this essential communication, which causes understandable frustration.
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I invented Deep Flip to automate such communication. It's web-scale. We're currently testing it on dumbshits and dipwads. Next week we'll start on asstards.
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"Reload and lay down some cover fire for me, dear, I'm changing lanes!"
When they first appear on the road... (Score:2)
...self driving cars will be obstacles
They will be slow, very slow.. kinda like a stoned old dude
People will attempt all sorts of extreme maneuvers to get around them
Most will succeed, some will fail
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Angry Californians (Score:2)
That is all of us. All Californians are angry. Wouldn't you be if you were taxed like us?
Sign of things to come (Score:2)
But if there's an accident between a person and a machine, there's a natural tendency to blame things on the machine. Car suddenly accelerates out of control? It must be a malfunction with the accele
of course not (Score:2)
The police were not called in either case.
Well of course not. This is California, where the lawbreaker is always in the right.
Uh, SF is not CA (Score:3)
Anyone else amused that the article conflates SF with the entirety of CA? News flash, folks: SF, LA and SD could very well be their own distinct state, with everyone else making up a very very red state.
Personally, I'd love to see that. Give them what they want; their own state. Their own echo chamber to do with as they please.
It'd be even more amusing than some random dumbass conflating SF with the entire state of CA.
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Dear Gods! Whatever will the Haitians in Southeast Florida do while talking to their families back home on the phone?
Automated Taxis won't jack up the fare by driving the wrong way either.