California's Democratic governor has vetoed a bill that would have required human drivers to be on board self-driving trucks.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill to require human drivers on board self-driving trucks, a measure that union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
-1
edit-2
1Y

Funny to see the argument being made here that this idea is crazy because people “don’t have the attention span” to monitor the robot driving the car. Like yes, that’s exactly the point, people suck at driving and maintaining constant attention, and they are worse than they were 10-20 years ago thanks to cell phones and screens. One in every hundred people you know will literally die due to this problem. For most people that means several people you knew in high school are dead because of people’s inability to drive perfectly all the time. That’s just deaths, many more will get injured or maimed. It doesn’t have to be this way. The only way out of it aside from somehow designing better humans is self-driving cars. They are already orders of magnitude safer than humans and have been so for years. Do they have bugs? Yes. But if we replaced every car on the road with a self-driving car right now we’d see the death and maiming rate plummet.

For context: we shut down the global economy for a virus with an estimated 1% mortality rate. It was necessary to avoid hospital overwhelm and give us time to develop countermeasures. That’s the same mortality rate as driving. Obviously drivers are not overwhelming hospitals because the deaths are spread out over a longer time period. But nonetheless I think it’s an interesting comparison.

janus2
link
fedilink
1
edit-2
1Y

[meta] this is a well-written comment that makes and argues several points relevant to the post and yet it got more downvotes than upvotes, which imho is some bullshit [/meta]

ANGRY_MAPLE
link
fedilink
11Y

deleted by creator

Create a post

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

  • 1 user online
  • 42 users / day
  • 169 users / week
  • 461 users / month
  • 2.24K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.07K Posts
  • 43.9K Comments
  • Modlog