alt Hacker NewsMeanwhile the news does not report the other ~7,000 children per year injured as pedestrians in traffic crashes in the US.
I think the overall picture is a pretty fantastic outcome -- even a single event is a newsworthy moment _because it's so rare_ .
> The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
Meanwhile in my area of the world parents are busy, stressed, and on their phones, and pressing the accelerator hard because they're time pressured and feel like that will make up for the 5 minutes late they are on a 15 minute drive... The truth is this technology is, as far as i can tell, superior to humans in a high number of situations if only for a lack of emotionality (and inability to text and drive / drink and drive)... but for some reason the world wants to keep nit picking it.
A story, my grandpa drove for longer than he should have. Yes him losing his license would have been the optimal case. But, pragmatically that didn't happen... him being in and using a Waymo (or Cruise, RIP) car would have been a marginal improvement on the situation.
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People's standards for when they're willing to cede control over their lives both as the passenger and the pedestrian in the situation to a machine are higher than a human.
And for not totally irrational reasons like machine follows programming and does not fear death, or with 100% certainty machine has bugs which will eventually end up killing someone for a really stupid reason—and nobody wants that to be them. Then there's just the general https://xkcd.com/2030/ problem of people rightfully not trusting technology because we are really bad at it, and our systems are set up in such a way that once you reach critical mass of money consequences become other people's problem.
Washington banned automatic subway train operation for 15 years after one incident that wasn't the computer's fault, and they still make a human sit in the cab. That's the bar. In that light it's hard not to see these cars as playing fast and loose with people's safety by comparison.
Err, that is not the desirable statistic you seem to think it is. American drivers average ~3 trillion miles per year [1]. That means ~7000 child pedestrian injurys per year [2] would be ~1 per 430 million miles. Waymo has done on the order of 100-200 million miles autonomously. So this would be ~2-4x more injurys than the human average.
However, the child pedestrian injury rate is only a official estimate (it is possible it may be undercounting relative to highly scrutinized Waymo vehicle-miles) and is a whole US average (it might not be a comparable operational domain), but absent more precise and better information, we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate.
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315
[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8137...