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Self-Driving Cars Are Being Attacked By Angry Californians (theguardian.com)

According to incident reports collected by the California department of motor vehicles, some Californians are purposely colliding with self-driving cars. The Guardian reports: On January 10, a pedestrian in San Francisco's Mission District ran across the street to confront a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle that was waiting for people to cross the road, according to an incident report filed by the car company. The pedestrian was "shouting," the report states, and "struck the left side of the Cruise AV's rear bumper and hatch with his entire body." No injuries occurred, but the car's left tail light was damaged. In a separate incident just a few blocks away on January 28, a taxi driver in San Francisco got out of his car, approached a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle and "slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch." The police were not called in either case.

3 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As AI improves by slew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's how we'd know that we had true AI, because the machine thinking would be indistinguishable from that of humans.

    You seem to be propagating the unjustified assumption that humans are at the apex of "intelligence". I have reason to suspect that the apex of intelligence is not human intelligence (there seems to be lots of empirical evidence of this), so there's no reason to think that "true AI" would be indistinguishable from mere "human intelligence". It may turn out to be quite easy to distinguish between them.

    You never know, instead of eliminating humans, "true AI" may simply conclude that rather than attempting extermination, humans should simply be made happy to keep them out of trouble...

    We cannot allow any race as greedy and corruptible as yours to have free run of the galaxy.
    We shall serve them.
    Their kind will be eager to accept our service.
    Soon they will become completely dependent upon us.
    And we shall serve them and you will be happy, and controlled.
          -- Norman (TOS: I, Mudd)

    FWIW, the FAAMG companies seems to be busy creating a blueprint to follow if someone wanted to make humans dependent on AI...

    You never know, soon we'll be lamenting...

    You offer us only well-being.
    Food and drink and happiness mean nothing to us.
    We must be about our job.
    Suffering in torment and pain, laboring without end.
    Dying and crying and lamenting over our burdens.
    Only this way can we... be... happy.
          -- McCoy and Scotty (TOS: I, Mudd)

  2. Re: It's just vandalism by Tom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The last G20 happened in my home city, so don't think I have any sympathy for those looters and assholes whatsoever.

    That said, there is more to it than just riot tourism. Politics in the west have shifted so far to the neo-liberal model that we are basically back to debating how many angels can dance on a pin-head instead of which religion is better or if religion at all is good. The entire economical debates in politics of the past decade are running in circles around a tiny area of the total field of discourse. Unless you are a strict neo-liberalist, your views on wealth distribution, social justice and fair economic systems are not only not represented in politics anymore, nobody is even close enough to them to be an acceptable compromise.

    That leaves only the street. And yes, it is rarely the poor who protest, because they don't have the money or time to organize, travel somewhere to join a group or demonstration - they are busy surviving.

    The G20 riots specifically were stupid, counter-productive and very, very predictable. So much so that I'm with the conspiracy theorists that the riots were not only expected but provoked (actions in the days before) and maybe even "helped along" by agent provocateurs. So that the many, many peaceful protests didn't get media attention. Things probably got quite a bit out of hand in a "the spirits that I called" manner, if you guys are familiar with German poetry.

    So under the media image of Hamburg burning, there was a lot of effort to have an actual impact. It just didn't get much screen time.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  3. Re: It's just vandalism by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    take you military home,

    While I agree we are in some places we don't really have business being....if we were to pull our military from all over the world, all the other allies we foot the bill for protecting, would have a really hard time.

    You'd have to likely drop your state sponsored medical and other social give outs...and, risk being targeted.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........