this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Person crosses street when they shouldn't.

Car lightly taps them and stops.

Person is not injured.

Person is stupid.

I think regulation is important, but this isn't news.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

TBF, the car is stupid to, not because of this just in general AI is stupid, if it was a human in the car we would just say he was angry but with AI we know it wasn’t angry and made a mistake, it happened to catch the mistake before it killed somebody but that mistake is in the programming of every single car of that type in the world, letting of a small problem like this is equal to saying it’s legal, since it will be a nation wide bug that is allowed.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. The person was on 'FA' and now (barely) on 'FO'.

What happened to looking both ways and being wary of the things that could crush you?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Reading the comments I get the impression that most people didn't actually read the article, which says that a woman was barely touched and not injured by a self-driving car while crossing the street with a red light.

There barely is "news" here, as the car correctly halted as soon as possible after noticing the pedestrian unforeseeable move, so let alone sides to take.

I am perfectly aware that self-driving technology still has numerous problems corroborated by the incidents reported from time to time, but if anything this article seems a proof that these cars will at least not crush to death the first pedestrian that does a funky move.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Why read the article when I can repeat lies and make tired jokes about social credit scores because China bad?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The car has perfect social credit, the 'human' failed to yield at a crosswalk once in 2003.

You do the math, idiotic westerners suck with our superior inverse-logic.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

How does "driverless cars hitting people is so incredibly rare that a single instance of it immediately becomes international news" at all signify "boring dystopia"? If anything we should be ecstatic that the technology to eliminate the vast majority of car deaths is so close and seems to be working so well.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of ridiculously, insanely amazing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think the hook of the story is people backing the not alive and not conscious vehicle instead of the injured, alive and conscious human.

I'm all for automating transportation, but if the importance of that convenience outweighs our ability to empathize, we're in for a real sad century.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I see you're not familiar with the trend of autonomous vehicles hitting pedestrians and parked cars. ~~They've been completely banned~~ They were suspended from San Francisco after many, many incidents. So far their track is inferior to humans (see Tesla Autopilot, Waymo, and Cruise), so you don't need to worry about perfect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As someone who was literally just in San Fran, the driverless cars are not only a thing, but they're booked out days in advance so idk where you're getting your info from

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I was in 2 of them in Phoenix. June 18th/19th est time. Took one home from the bar, and one to go pick up the rental car from the bar to drop off at the air port.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Here's a picture of one driving around a couple weeks ago

Self Driving in San Fran

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

In December, Waymo safety data—based on 7.1 million miles of driverless operations—showed that human drivers are four to seven times more likely to cause injuries than Waymo cars.

From your first article.

Cruise, which is a subsidiary of General Motors, says that its safety record "over five million miles" is better in comparison to human drivers.

From your second.

Your third article doesn't provide any numbers, but it's not about fully autonomous vehicles anyway.

In short, if you're going to claim that their track record is actually worse than humans, you need to provide some actual evidence.

Edit: Here's a recent New Scientist article claiming that driverless cars "generally demonstrate better safety than human drivers in most scenarios" even though they perform worse in turns, for example.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you just look a pure numbers, sure, you can make it sound good. When you go look at the types of accidents, it's pretty damning. Waymo and Cruise both have a history of hitting parked cars and emergency vehicles. Tesla Autopilot is notorious for accelerating at the back of parked emergency vehicles.

The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.

I'm not personally against self driving cars once they're actually as competent as a human in determining their surroundings, but we're not there yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.

As long as the overall number of injuries/deaths is lower for autonomous vehicles (and as you've acknowledged, that does seem to be what the data shows), I don't care how "stupid" autonomous vehicles' accidents are. Not to mention that their safety records will only improve as they get more time on the roads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yeah that was my thought too... driverless cars don't need to never fuck up, they need to fuck up less than humans do. And we fuck up a LOT.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I'd argue they need to fuck up less than the alternative means of transport that we could be transitioning to if we weren't so dead-set on being car dependent. So dead-set, in fact, that we are allowing ourselves to be made complacent; by billion-dollar companies that peddle entirely new technology to excuse the death and destruction to our environment and social fabric that they've wrought upon us and continue to perpetuate; instead of us demanding new iterations of the old, safer, more affordable, more efficient, but unfortunately less profitable tech that our country sold out to those same monied interests for them to dismantle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I mean, I'm on board with the fuck-cars reasoning, but also recognize that we'll never make it happen except by our own extinction. And we're speedrunning that shit. Let's take whatever improvements we can realistically get, be it cars or whatever else, and hit what's left of Earth's ability to support life as comfortably as possible. If that includes running over fewer people by using R2D2 to cart us around vs our own monkey brains... cool! If it's something better, extra cool! I'll take progress wherever I can get it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. As early as the technology still is, it seems like it's already orders of magnitude better than human drivers.

I guess the arbitrary/unfeeling impression of driverless car deaths bothers people more than the "it was just an accident" impression of human-caused deaths. Personally, as long as driverless car deaths are significantly rarer than human-caused deaths (and it already seems like they are much, much rarer), I'd rather take the lower chance of dying in a car accident, but that's just me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think the problem right now is that driverless cars are still way worse than human drivers in a lot of edge cases. And buffalo buffalo buffalo when you have so many people driving every day you end up with a lot of edge cases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

That's probably true, but their handling of edge cases will only get better the more time they spend on the roads, and it already looks like they're significantly safer than humans under normal circumstances, which make up the vast majority of the time spent on the road.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Why is social media options any factor in this discussion?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

...they asked on social media.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

It's beneficial to know what the general public thinks about issues?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

With the terrible demographic distribution, the absolute sewage social media is and the bots that make more than half the content. If you want to know what the general public thinks, you could not chose any worse source

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I don't think "posts on social media" is a good indicator for what the public thinks anymore, if ever. The amount and reach of bot or bought accounts are disturbingly high.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Social media aren't "the general public"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a better way of interviewing Chinese Nationals for Western media?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago
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