You've almost perfectly described Delamain and his side missions from Cyberpunk 2077

Or worse the waymo gets put in to 'gang mode' by someone bribed on the inside, the car rolls the window down for the drive by, delivers the duffle bags of drugs, auto darkens the windows for a drive by kidnapping, think of the UX possibilities!

Self-driving cars don't "feel"

Don't talk to me about the 90s if you weren't soaking a tennis ball in lighter fluid and firing the flaming missile out of a "potato gun" made out of beer cans... in the 70s. Also something about all the kids trying to imitate Evil Knievel and jumping their bikes off ramps made out of planks and milk crates... Without protective gear of any kind.

Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.

;-)

Considering how to deal with people brandishing weapons in a Waymo is not just imagining a scenario, since it has already actually happened.

I also grew up in the 90s and did things like throw eggs out of cars. We wouldn't have done it from a taxi or Uber. Your comment really makes no sense.

I grew up in the 90s too, and I’m fairly certain that shooting paintball guns out of a taxi would have been generally frowned upon even during that halcyon era.

I lived next to the ghetto as kid in the 90s and my mom was driving me by a car of ghetto dudes and I absolutely blasted them with a super soaker as an 8yo. They also had super soakers we got hosed back. Greatest decade ever!

Just like would happen with open carrying anywhere?

On the contrary, we have a long history of evidence that when people think they aren't being watched, enough of them will do awful things.

This is why public restrooms in the US are vandalized, why there are low effort graffiti tags all over, litter in parks, and more.

People believing that something is watching - a human or machine with the autonomy to enact consequences - preserves the commons for the rest of us.

Good thing Waymo yells you you're being monitored then.

I own airsoft (pellet) guns people have confused for real ones when I left them on a shelf in my house. If you don't know what to look for they look quite convincing these days. Take a look around https://www.evike.com/airsoft-guns/ - everyone deletes or spray paints the orange tips because they make you really visible on the airsoft field.

It's not like you can allow kids to shoot pellet guns out of a car indefinitely in a metro without substantial risk of something going wrong.

We need to (be able to) trust the police to not escalate irresponsibly and to deal with situations with nuance. Declining to escalate to authorities because we're scared of what they may do is not great.

Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun.

And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.

Really only airsofters know telltale signs of toy guns. Guys into real guns can't instantly tell them apart.

It's that way because real guns weren't available in Japan but real-ism wasn't defined, so Japanese toy gun brands just turned that volume up to 1100 without allowing toy guns take pressure bearing gun parts. And then those toy guns got exported and copied, leading to the present status.

Probably

You'd never had a discussion about firearms with the average person then. Good luck.

So? In the real scenario, the underage passengers were drinking alcohol. Also, the 14-17 teen accounts are supposed to be monitored by parents, otherwise all riders need to be adults or their guests. That means they need to exercise judgment not brandishing what might look like weapons. The same way you need to exercise that judgment in a public park.

And I'm not even convinced that human drivers would be more discerning or rational about it. They could easily overstate the issue to police and create a more biased situation.

I’m not sure the line is that clear.

Any gun shooting projectiles out of a moving vehicle is dangerous. Pellet guns and paintball guns are less dangerous than “regular” guns, but they’re not really toys.