> Waymo is held to a significantly higher standard than human drivers.

They have to be, as a machine can not be held accountable for a decision.

Slowing the adoption of much-safer-than-humans robotaxis, for whatever reason, has a price measured in lives. If you think that the principle you've just stated is worth all those additional dead people, okay; but you should at least be aware of the price.

Failure to acknowledge the existence of tradeoffs tends to lead to people making really lousy trades, in the same way that running around with your eyes closed tends to result in running into walls and tripping over unseen furniture.

	▲	kj4211cash 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But we have no way of knowing whether robotaxis are safer. See, for example, the arguments raised here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-06/are-auton... We can't blindly trust Waymo's PR releases or apples-to-oranges comparisons. That's why the bar is higher.

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dragonwriter 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Waymo is not a machine, it is a corporation, and corporations can, in fact be held accountable for decisions (and, perhaps more to the point, for defects in goods they manufacture, sell, distribute, and/or use to provide services.)

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TeMPOraL 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The promise of self-driving cars being safer than human drivers is also kind of the whole selling point of the technology.

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myrmidon 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What? No? The main selling point is eliminating costs for a human driver (by enabling people to safely do other things from their car, like answering emails or doomscrolling, or via robotaxis).

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micromacrofoot 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but the companies building them are just shoving billions of dollars into their ears so they don't have to answer "who's responsible when it kills someone?"

	▲	TeMPOraL 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The question of responsibility, while philosophically interesting wrt. increasingly autonomous machines, is not going to be an issue in practice. We'll end up dealing with it like we always do with multi-party responsibility in complex systems: regulators setting safety standards and outlining types and structures of liabiliy, contracts shifting the liability around, and lots and lots of insurance. In fact, if you substitute "company providing self-driving solution (integrated software + hardware)" for "company renting out commercial drivers" (or machine operators), then self-driving cars already fit well into existing legal framework. The way I see it, the only change self-driving cars introduce here is that there is no individual operator we could blame for the accident, no specific human we could heavily fine or jail, and then feel good about ourselves because we've issued retributive justice and everything is whole now. Everything else has already long been worked out.

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JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They have to be, as a machine can not be held accountable for a decision

This logic applies equally to all cars, which are machines. Waymo has its decision makers one more step removed than human drivers. But it’s not a good axiom to base any theory of liability on.