There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not even an issue.

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autoexec 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you.

There are also new risks that weren't possible before. A software error can send you into oncoming traffic. Hackers can gain control of your vehicle either directly/remotely or by cleverly designed signage placed on the roadside. A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people. A flashing stoplight can leave you stranded at an intersection. The car may not see or react appropriately any number of uncommon hazards that human drivers would recognize and avoid. Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years. There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.

	▲	tgsovlerkhgsel 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Frequency matters. One of these sets of risk is mostly theoretical (aside from the large scale stoplight outage), one of them is happening often enough that anyone who takes rideshare repeatedly will have a story. If we limit ourselves to risks that have actually manifested, not hypothetical risks, I'd rather risk getting stuck at an intersection if there is a city wide power outage than deal with the weird conversations I've had on rideshares (not even counting the countless drivers who demonstrated that it is possible to drive a car without crashing for the duration of one rideshare ride without taking your eyes off the phone for more than a few seconds at a time).
	▲	TheDong 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people. They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control. They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone. > Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years. The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in. Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software. > There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet. This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly. We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already. I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.

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dbt00 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is like keeping your kids inside in case something bad happens to them.

If your kids never leave the house, something bad definitely happens to them, they stay kids.

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0x3f 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is there some benefit to talking to weird Uber drivers I've yet to discover that's comparable with 'going outside at all'?

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toast0 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Interaction with the common person is great. I wouldn't have know one could trim their toenails while driving otherwise.

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aworks 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or that a taxi driver in Wuhan could answer his phone while shifting his manual transmission and smoking a cigarette.

	▲	toast0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Pretty sure that's part of the taxi exam.

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Ferret7446 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are probably better places to interact with other people than rideshares, like at a public establishment. There's significantly less risk

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sublinear 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. "Weird" people are somewhat rare opportunity to build certain social skills.

I enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways to guide the discussion and understand their headspace for a little while. I am not even trying to control the level of weirdness, but just keep them talking and comfortable.

Unfortunately, most of the time they're not even weird people and it was just a weird first impression. They vent for like 3 minutes and then it gets boring again.

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whyenot 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I realize it is hard to do this, but please understand that other people have different perspectives on personal safety. For example, try and image how things might be different if you were a woman alone in an Uber with a driver who starts saying weird things.

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sublinear 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would rather say they develop crippling anxiety and agoraphobia. This is happening right now even to adults working from home.

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0x3f 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are second order effects though. Once Waymo kills the Uber driver/taxi jobs, what are the chances your Waymo is attacked by a roving band of jobless drivers? It's surely nonzero.

	▲	whyenot 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This seems a little silly. Did mobs of jobless taxi drivers attack the Uber drivers who took their jobs? No. No offense, but if you have a girlfriend, wife, or female friend, you might want to ask them about safety and security of ride sharing services. I suspect their answer will be an eye opener for you.
	▲	hmartin 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Using "second order effects" because big words sound cool without understanding the whole point of "second order"...