Kudos for tracking down the original study. In my opinion, it should not be acceptable for a Union of Scientists to write "studies have shown ..." without any references to those publications. This is especially the case when journalists are expected to report on those claims.
I can't believe that an author who wrote a long piece about how quiet is gentrification which never even alluded to the body of work showing how bad constant exposure to noise is for health would be so shoddy with her evidence.
Those same arguments against Waymo’s (or any AVs) also ignore the benefits that Waymo’s provide for women and people with disabilities.
As someone who doesn’t (can’t drive), the best thing for me is more availability and cheaper access to all forms of transportation. AVs have long been a dream for many and whether or not a privately owned ride share company is the exact vision of the future, it is a clear step towards progress. Of course, yes, I want fast and reliable and affordable public transit. But I also want my own autonomy—one that necessarily doesn’t rely on as many humans to get me to where I want or need to go.
And of course, almost universally the women I know in San Francisco describe the feelings of safety and freedom in Waymo’s. Of course the vast majority of Uber drivers are fine. But we cannot deny that the chance of a very terrible encounter, albeit “small”, has a very meaningful impact on the freedom (or lack thereof) that women and other marginalized people experience with platforms like Uber. Waymo’s are a way to reclaim that freedom.
And I will further add as a pedestrian with low vision but one who still appreciates cars—6 Waymo’s in a row on your street can be frustrating and just look silly. But at the end of the day, I trust and have experienced that they are more likely to stop for me than many of the human drivers in the city we share. 🤷 forgive me for welcoming this change.
How embarrassing for The Atlantic, “we should leave people trapped in automateable manual labor jobs so I can talk to them while they work” is a terrible take.
This is just a comment about the aside on gig work. I’ve been very disheartened that liberal advocacy for gig work usually involves being against regulation of the labor of gig work. Gig work can be good but it’s terrible if it involves below minimum wage work which, from my time working uber, it always does. Especially after you account for expenses.
My love for Waymo is tied almost exclusively to moving Uber/Lyft to buy its own cars instead of depending on “independent contractors.” Moving the costs off of labor is a positive. And it’s also a positive when cities and states regulate to ensure drivers are paid a fair minimum wage after accounting for costs!
One thing to emphasize is exactly what's in the study. They take 8 pedestrian detectors, by which they mean computer programs that annotate a still image with where pedestrians are, and test them on a big dataset of images. The detectors are all published and available software, but they are not autonomous driving systems, which have multiple cameras, sensor fusion, and video rather than a single image.
Additionally, the systems they test are not from commercial AV companies such as Waymo. They say that one of the systems is based on something used for the Apollo Chinese AV company, but they are definitely not testing that AV system. The papers are all by authors at universities and companies without self driving systems (such as Facebook).
Gonzalez is a fount of moronic takes, such as advocating for smoking. If only I could get a high paying job that consisted of propagating idiocy every now and then instead of having to do real work for 40h/week.
That said, the solution is a) to have a very high onus on claims of bigotry and b) to also have a reverse onus, basically “prove that the group you’re defending hasn’t brought it upon themselves - do they exhibit elevated rates of antisocial behaviors such as crime, backward thinking, agitation, victim mentality or in group narcissism? Yes? Then improve them before demanding anything”.
Thank you for this. The part of her argument that truly made me tear at my hair was the ignoring of base rates. Even if autonomous vehicles were moderately racist--let's be generous to the argument and say 25% more likely to miss a person of color--the 70-95% lower overall death rate would thoroughly wash out that effect. The racist autonomous vehicles would still kill fewer of people of color!
Kudos for tracking down the original study. In my opinion, it should not be acceptable for a Union of Scientists to write "studies have shown ..." without any references to those publications. This is especially the case when journalists are expected to report on those claims.
I can't believe that an author who wrote a long piece about how quiet is gentrification which never even alluded to the body of work showing how bad constant exposure to noise is for health would be so shoddy with her evidence.
Those same arguments against Waymo’s (or any AVs) also ignore the benefits that Waymo’s provide for women and people with disabilities.
As someone who doesn’t (can’t drive), the best thing for me is more availability and cheaper access to all forms of transportation. AVs have long been a dream for many and whether or not a privately owned ride share company is the exact vision of the future, it is a clear step towards progress. Of course, yes, I want fast and reliable and affordable public transit. But I also want my own autonomy—one that necessarily doesn’t rely on as many humans to get me to where I want or need to go.
And of course, almost universally the women I know in San Francisco describe the feelings of safety and freedom in Waymo’s. Of course the vast majority of Uber drivers are fine. But we cannot deny that the chance of a very terrible encounter, albeit “small”, has a very meaningful impact on the freedom (or lack thereof) that women and other marginalized people experience with platforms like Uber. Waymo’s are a way to reclaim that freedom.
And I will further add as a pedestrian with low vision but one who still appreciates cars—6 Waymo’s in a row on your street can be frustrating and just look silly. But at the end of the day, I trust and have experienced that they are more likely to stop for me than many of the human drivers in the city we share. 🤷 forgive me for welcoming this change.
How embarrassing for The Atlantic, “we should leave people trapped in automateable manual labor jobs so I can talk to them while they work” is a terrible take.
This is just a comment about the aside on gig work. I’ve been very disheartened that liberal advocacy for gig work usually involves being against regulation of the labor of gig work. Gig work can be good but it’s terrible if it involves below minimum wage work which, from my time working uber, it always does. Especially after you account for expenses.
My love for Waymo is tied almost exclusively to moving Uber/Lyft to buy its own cars instead of depending on “independent contractors.” Moving the costs off of labor is a positive. And it’s also a positive when cities and states regulate to ensure drivers are paid a fair minimum wage after accounting for costs!
I think this is just a holdover from the era when calling something racist was a cheat code to win arguments in left-of-center spaces.
Gonzalez has always been sloppy like this.
One thing to emphasize is exactly what's in the study. They take 8 pedestrian detectors, by which they mean computer programs that annotate a still image with where pedestrians are, and test them on a big dataset of images. The detectors are all published and available software, but they are not autonomous driving systems, which have multiple cameras, sensor fusion, and video rather than a single image.
Additionally, the systems they test are not from commercial AV companies such as Waymo. They say that one of the systems is based on something used for the Apollo Chinese AV company, but they are definitely not testing that AV system. The papers are all by authors at universities and companies without self driving systems (such as Facebook).
Gonzalez is a fount of moronic takes, such as advocating for smoking. If only I could get a high paying job that consisted of propagating idiocy every now and then instead of having to do real work for 40h/week.
That said, the solution is a) to have a very high onus on claims of bigotry and b) to also have a reverse onus, basically “prove that the group you’re defending hasn’t brought it upon themselves - do they exhibit elevated rates of antisocial behaviors such as crime, backward thinking, agitation, victim mentality or in group narcissism? Yes? Then improve them before demanding anything”.
Thank you for this. The part of her argument that truly made me tear at my hair was the ignoring of base rates. Even if autonomous vehicles were moderately racist--let's be generous to the argument and say 25% more likely to miss a person of color--the 70-95% lower overall death rate would thoroughly wash out that effect. The racist autonomous vehicles would still kill fewer of people of color!