this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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An emergency stop is better than nothing, but they should ALSO have an emergency "let me take control". Sometimes stopping does not decrease the danger.
Example: the waymo enters a rail crossing with flashing lights, and the barriers close with the car inside. The waymo sees the barriers so it stops. What you want in that case is accelerate and get the fuck out of there. If you have a baby in the backseat, there may not be enough time to get the baby and get out of there on foot.
This is the fundamental problem with automated cars and remote (or embedded) kill switches: they can never account for the edge cases that humans can readily adapt to. People will die as a result of those edge cases. Will it save more than it costs in human life, and are we willing to make that trade as a society? I can't answer that but neither can the people making the decisions to make Waymo profitable over public safety.
Yeah I’m pretty sure it will. Humans are also incompetent, egotistical, self-righteous drivers. Statistics say humans are in reality poor drivers and I’m confident the self-driving car will be safer overall
But there will always be those edge cases where a human could perhaps do better. They have different weaknesses. So it won’t be a clear cut decision when self-driving would be widely allowed
This was also my opinion from doing a trial of full self driving. It did an amazing job, and most of my corrections were wrong. It is already safer than a human in “normal driving” and has been for a while. But every drive had edge cases where it just wasn’t ready.
Yeah the only real solution to this problem is to put a genuinely competent AGI into the car. Which of course of course they've known from the start, but have never been prepared to admit.
It's not really a solution to rely on something that doesn't exist. The closest we can get is to have a person there to oversee and be liable for whatever happens.