San Francisco group placing traffic cones on self-driving cars to disable them.

[MT]

Driverless cars creating traffic jams in San Francisco

[coppercone2]

lmfao a unicorn

while its cool is anyone suspicious there is like a oceangate grade CEO behind these cars?

[Ed.Kloonk]

2nd video toward the end. Banging on about safety.. conducts interview while standing in the middle of the street.

Fire trucks do have a bull bar.

[SiliconWizard]

lmfao a unicorn

while its cool is anyone suspicious there is like a oceangate grade CEO behind these cars?

Oh, there kind of is.

[ConKbot]

Flashing lights = stop, hey at least it's better than Tesla's signature move of "drive into the rear of a fire truck at highway speeds" 

[tom66]

There will always be luddites afraid of progress.  Personally I can hardly wait for the self-driving car future.

[Stray Electron]

  Future headline:  "California passes new laws to prevent the harassment of energy efficient green vehicles."

   FYI there is also a group running loose in California that is going around and slashing the tires of any SUV that they can find.

   California isn't called "The land of Fruits and Nuts" for nothing.

[SiliconWizard]

  Future headline:  "California passes new laws to prevent the harassment of energy efficient green vehicles."

Yes, that's not completely unlikely.

Laws to prevent harassment of "AI" in general may also see the light. I wouldn't be hugely surprised.

[MrMobodies]

lmfao a unicorn

Like this one?

[nctnico]

There will always be luddites afraid of progress.  Personally I can hardly wait for the self-driving car future.

Indeed. And they don't even want to show their faces!

[coppercone2]

they should call them pegasus

[SiliconWizard]

"We must prepare for an angrier world."

[mendip_discovery]

There will always be luddites afraid of progress.  Personally I can hardly wait for the self-driving car future.

We already live in a very selfish world where you can have deliveries of stuff by staff, seven days a week. Now we are looking at having computers drive to save the effort of having to do it myself. Personally, I can't be bothered by the self-driving future and all it brings. Though I doubt I will be around to be affected by it all.

[I wanted a rude username]

I'm a huge fan of self-driving cars, but the way the Cruise cars drive is giving the concept a bad reputation. Their movement is incongruously reluctant most of the time, but then they'll blatantly pull out in front of oncoming traffic when making turns ... it's the self-driving equivalent of the 98-year-old grandma who can barely see over the steering wheel. These cars are not ready to be driving themselves, and the reaction is understandable.

[ebastler]

There will always be luddites afraid of progress.  Personally I can hardly wait for the self-driving car future.

In the present case, the sentiment apparently is not "We don't want no self-driving cars, ever", but "We don't want immature self-driving cars to be road-tested here, creating traffic obstacles and hazards". Given the reports of Cruise cars regularly getting stuck and blocking traffic, I can relate to that.

If Cruise feel that they need real-world road testing for the next step in their cars' development, they should spend the money to put a human observer and backup driver into each of these cars. Letting them loose unattended seems premature.

[bdunham7]

Letting them loose unattended seems premature.

They're under pressure from Stockton Rush type investors and management to conclude and assert that they are nearly ready for prime time when in fact they aren't.  If they admit that they need another decade with no guarantee that there is a solution to all the issues, the plug will be pulled in an instant.

[SiliconWizard]

Letting them loose unattended seems premature.

They're under pressure from Stockton Rush type investors and management to conclude and assert that they are nearly ready for prime time when in fact they aren't.  If they admit that they need another decade with no guarantee that there is a solution to all the issues, the plug will be pulled in an instant.

Absolutely.
And no amount of OceanGate-like catastrophes is apparently going to change that. Do not even hope it will trigger change. It won't.

[KE5FX]

Comparisons with OceanGate are ridiculous.  In the US alone, human drivers kill about 30,000 people every year.  Those who stand in the way of autonomous vehicle R&D are basically saying, "I'm OK with that."

There are no self-driving cars in my garage.  If you saw the ones that are there, you'd wrinkle your nose at my point above, and you'd mutter that perhaps it would be better made by someone else.  But let's be realistic here... the only creatures that suck worse than robots at driving are humans.   

Think you know how to do it better?  I'm sure the HR departments at Waymo and Tesla and Cruise have open reqs.  Go show 'em how it's done.  In the meantime, don't get in the way of the people who are already trying their best.

[Benta]

In the US alone, human drivers kill about 30,000 people every year.  Those who stand in the way of autonomous vehicle R&D are basically saying, "I'm OK with that."

Fat red herring.
Read reply #15 again, it hits the point.
Testing immature technology on the general populace is a no-go.
And what happened to my flying car? They promised me one last century.   

[bdunham7]

Those who stand in the way of autonomous vehicle R&D are basically saying, "I'm OK with that."

In the meantime, don't get in the way of the people who are already trying their best.

I'm not saying I'm OK with that anymore than I'm OK with the number of people that die from cancer or diabetes.  But not being OK with those things does not make it appropriate to lie and obfuscate about the efficacy of the proposed remedy, whether it be quack medicine or self-driving tech that doesn't work yet.  Nobody is "standing in the way" of autonomous vehicle research unless you consider opposition to experiments on non-volunteer human subjects (with the occasional death) to be obstructionist.

[SiliconWizard]

In the US alone, human drivers kill about 30,000 people every year.  Those who stand in the way of autonomous vehicle R&D are basically saying, "I'm OK with that."

Fat red herring.
Read reply #15 again, it hits the point.
Testing immature technology on the general populace is a no-go.

Yes, that's just the point.

(By the same reasoning, one could otherwise argue that there's a gross overreaction to OceanGate's debacle itself, as it's been operating for over 10 years and had "only" 5 deaths, while there are over 4000 people per year that die from drowning in the USA alone: https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/data/index.html . Playing with numbers with no regards to morals is fun, isn't it?)

And what happened to my flying car? They promised me one last century.   

My little finger is telling me right now that it won't happen anytime in the next, uh, century, or something.
But some companies are working on "drones" for flying taxi services.
The future of individual transportation per se doesn't look too bright, it's not just about flying cars.

[Stray Electron]

I'm a huge fan of self-driving cars, but the way the Cruise cars drive is giving the concept a bad reputation. Their movement is incongruously reluctant most of the time, but then they'll blatantly pull out in front of oncoming traffic when making turns ... it's the self-driving equivalent of the 98-year-old grandma who can barely see over the steering wheel. These cars are not ready to be driving themselves, and the reaction is understandable.

   When self driving cards get into accidents that were caused by their actions, I wonder if anyone will be charged or be held accountable and if so, then who? The engineer in California that designed it, the builder in Mexico or China, the programmer in India that programmed it or the CEO of headquarters company located in some place like San Francisco.

    Self-driving cars that were not supposed to be self-driving have already be in a number of accidents, including at least one pedestrian fatality and a good number of passenger fatalities, but I haven't heard of anyone ever being charged in any of the accidents. Does anyone KNOW of real life criminal charges that anyone has ever faced in the case of a self-driving vehicle? 

    Until all of these types of questions have been satisfactorily answered, it's no wonder that the general public doesn't want these cars on the roads.

[KE5FX]

Testing immature technology on the general populace is a no-go.

If you know of a way to get a complex system working without real-world testing, then by all means, please enlighten the rest of us.

And what happened to my flying car? They promised me one last century.   

Pick your reason:

1) The pilots' union screamed bloody murder and got it outlawed. 

2) People laughed at the people who were trying to make it happen

3) People sabotaged the work of the people who were trying to make it happen

4) What, are you nuts?  Have you seen the way people DRIVE?  We will get flying cars after self-driving ones, not before.  If you want a flying car, get out of the way of the people trying to make self-driving cars work.

[ebastler]

Testing immature technology on the general populace is a no-go.

If you know of a way to get a complex system working without real-world testing, then by all means, please enlighten the rest of us.

Simple: Put a human observer/emergency driver into each test car. I am stunned that they got permission to road-test with unmanned cars at this early development stage.

[coppercone2]

they might need to pay insurance and health care if they hire a employee, You can't pave the road to the future by actually hiring employees to maintain ground breaking technology, that's so 1950 

Big dollar disruptive tech but you can't afford employees 

The funniest thing is though that they probobly say they can't afford the high salary for a test driver because of liability. Meanwhile the test pedestrians get nothing. Almost feels like we need a pedestrian union to prevent unsafe working conditions.

Slightly amusing because it used to be that the machine that can maul you was in the factory, you got paid to interact with it and it was rather immobile. Now its mobile and you don't get paid. No operator even. Maybe the people nearby should get a bit of a tax break or something on behalf of the developer. They still put a operator for a train or subway that drives around a well isolated and totally restricted circuit with heavy barriers to ingress of the population.. meanwhile the car is mixed right in and you don't get shit. IMO completely ridiculous.