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.

Comments

I wonder what good they think that will do?

[WilliamGeorge]

I wonder what good they think that will do? Its not going to offend the car, or cause it to retaliate. Its also not going to stop progress on this front.

Re:I wonder what good they think that will do?

[psmoot]

I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...

Bite your tongue! Buggies are beautiful and gentle animals. Be grateful we are past the dark and savage era when someone could whip an innocent enslaved buggy with impunity!

You sir are a cad!

Re:I wonder what good they think that will do?

[mark-t]

I imagine they think it will annoy the owner enough to not want to deal with the hassle of owning such a vehicle.

Re:I wonder what good they think that will do?

[slew]

I wonder if they used buggy whips on the offending cars...

They probably threw their shoes at the offending cars...

"400 years ago, on Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes called 'sabots' into the machines to stop them. Hence the word 'sabotage'." -- Lt. Valeris (in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country)

Re: I wonder what good they think that will do?

[slazzy]

Start a, new business: dummies for driverless cars to make them look like they are being driven by someone.

It's just vandalism

[rsilvergun]

We encourage self expression but also shit all over a big portion of our population (economically speaking). The result is vandalism. They're not thinking in terms of stopping progress. They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.

Countries like Japan deal with this by discouraging expression. They also have unusually high suicide rates. I suppose we could also not abandon a large chunk of our population to economic desolation, but, well, that costs money. And we're nothing if not cheapskates.

Re:It's just vandalism

[Anonymous Coward]

We encourage self expression but also shit all over a big portion of our population (economically speaking). The result is vandalism. They're not thinking in terms of stopping progress. They're just angry. Usually because they lack good economic prospects.

What about personal responsibility ?

People who vandalize property which belongs to others have the maturity level of a young child, and a young child who has not been properly taught how to behave, at that.

We are all responsible for our own lives. If you cannot handle that notion, maybe you should kill yourself so you don't burden others with your needy pathetic existence.

Re:It's just vandalism

[jwhyche]

Fucking hippies. This is why we can't have nice things. Like robot overlords.....

Re:It's just vandalism

[angel'o'sphere]

Countries like Japan deal with this by discouraging expression.
Expression of what?
Ever been in Japan? Guessed so ...

They also have unusually high suicide rates.
But not for the reasons you think.

In Japan unemployment is a shame.
In America it is a disgrace.
In Europe it is _normal_

Re: It's just vandalism

[c6gunner]

It's rarely the poor who are out there protesting these things. The people at the G20 and "occupy Wall Street" protests may have looked homeless, but the vast majority were quite well off. It's not about actual impact, it's about ideology, and spoiled overgrown children looking for a cause.

Re:It's just vandalism

[crgrace]

Many, many people in SF lack good economic prospects. There are a lot of highly educated engineers and physicians, sure, but these aren't the folks that are attacking self-driving cars.

We have a large population of dead-end folks living day-to-day in Single-Occupancy Residences (essentially run down hotels), shelters, housing projects, and on the streets. They are largely unskilled and many of them are not mentally balanced.

We also have economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with large numbers of people who don't (or can't) graduate high-school. Where is there a place for them in the new economy?

If you ever visit San Francisco, what will strike you is the extreme mismatch between the upper-middle class and the poor. We have a lot of both and not as many blue-color traditionally middle-class folks. The working class mostly commutes.

Re:It's just vandalism

[Immerman]

You want to balance the breeding rate? It's easy enough to do - give the "undesirable" women easy access to cost- and stigma-free birth control, and good family planning education. People are never going to stop humping like bunnies, so give them a reliable option to avoid reproducing because of it, of the same sort that wealthy people make regular use of. It's worked extremely well pretty much everywhere it's been tried, as is pretty much the only thing that has actually worked.

You take a huge step in the direction you want to go, and you do it without genocide, in a way that actually helps the undesirables improve their situation and themselves. But just try to get that past the "moral majority" in the US.

Re: It's just vandalism

[pedz]

Well... you are neglecting something called consequences. Sure, it is "illegal" or "improper" to kill folks or vandalize cars and often those who do that go to jail or whatever.

But it is also illegal as well as immoral to utterly fuck over your fellow citizen with your greed and usually those folks do not go to jail. But, karma still comes around and shits on them by way of being vandalized, assassinated, and taunted a second time.

Its all good man.!

Re:It's just vandalism

[Tom]

It used to be very much not normal in Europe, and how shameful it is depends on how normal it is.

When I grew up, I wasn't aware of a single unemployed person in my social circles. No parent or friend of parents or relative, not one. People who didn't work were either too young or too old.

The older I get, the more unemployed people show up. Several of my friends are now unemployed. This is an intentional political shift to put pressure on people to accept low-paying jobs.

When the movie "Falling Down" came out in 1993, I understood immediately why the protagonist is hiding that he lost his job, no explanation was necessary. I don't think you could show the movie to todays audiences without explaining that point.

Re: It's just vandalism

[Tom]

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.

Re: It's just vandalism

[cayenne8]

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.

Luddites attacking their jobkillers

[nospam007]

News for nerds from the 19th century.

As AI improves

[Lead Butthead]

the machines would eventually concludes the root cause of most collisions had been the humans and their elimination would go a long way toward traffic safety...

Re:As AI improves

[slew]

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)

Go for the food delivery robots!

[mspohr]

I can't wait until the food delivery robots start making their rounds.
All it would take would be a crowbar for random people to get access to regular food deliveries.

Re:Go for the food delivery robots!

[Kjella]

They have to catch you first. They have real criminals to catch first. If you RTFA, you'll see that nobody was arrested for the incidents.

More specifically, it said they didn't call the police in the first place. I guess they're trying to send the message that you're just being a nuisance and we don't care, so there's no point in doing it and maybe avoid a Streisand effect. If that backfires I'm sure they'll call in the police if they take serious damage, widespread damage, have repeat offenders or the service for paying customers is sabotaged. Right now though it seems they're just reporting it to be totally up-front with the regulators about all unwanted contact, not because it matters.

Self driving is fine

[timere969]

They are not beating on it because it is self-driving. They are beating on it because it is a GM.

Re:If you trust them

[GrBear]

Why, is there some reason they can only turn clockwise?

Re:What is the gain?

[arth1]

What do people expect to happen from attacking robots?

That they get heard.

Send a letter, and nobody will read it, and it will certainly not be escalated up to the person you addressed it to. But do a small act of defiance like this, and it hits the news, and those high up will notice that the product doesn't get an universal warm welcome, no matter what their trail of sycophants might have told them.

really poor title and writeup

[meglon]

I mean, seriously biased. The title should be: Freedom Fighters from the Future Engage in Skirmishes with Machines to Push Back Judgement Date.

Obligatory...

[WilliamGeorge]

In Soviet California, pedestrian runs into you!

What we've got here is failure to communicate.

[swell]

This is simply a response to the failure to communicate. In CA as in many other places, it is customary for drivers and pedestrians to enjoy a lively communication. This typically involves vigorous hand, arm and facial body language as well as enthusiastic vocal invitations to do various things with various body parts.

In order to comply with this tradition, my wife and I would share this responsibility. Whichever was NOT driving the vehicle would yell at the assholes in other vehicles, and pedestrians who got out of the way, and apply the appropriate gestures. In this fashion, the driver was relieved of the duty and able to focus clearly on the next target down the road.

Self-driving cars are not yet sophisticated enough to participate in this essential communication, which causes understandable frustration.