(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)
a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?
of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)
This isn’t a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they’ll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.
we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)
Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.
remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?
This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.
yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!
Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.
this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:
Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.
oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this
> “I hope for the day where all cars are self-driving. People will cycle more”
bzuh?
yeah, I can’t even begin to deconstruct the orange site’s weird opinions on bikes, but this one was particularly bad. assuming self-driving tech works perfectly, that’d very clearly lead to cities having much less bike infrastructure and therefore a lot less folks having the ability to practically ride bicycles to places they want to be. but that’s not how the tech actually works; actual self-driving cars are fucking terrible at detecting and coexisting safely with bicycles and riders, and given how marginalized traveling by bike already is in American cities, there’s not a lot of incentive to make them better at it vs creating even more systems that punish folks for using any form of transport that isn’t a car
My assumption would be that either a reply like that is someone who really doesn’t believe self driving will ever be viable (thus if all the cars are mandated to be driverless, people will give them up out of frustration with their flaws and be forced to go to alternatives like cycling instead), or someone who does expect the tech to work and expects them to be developed to a point of being significantly safer to be around than human drivers (thus as one reason people might not cycle is being or feeling unsafe due to the actions of nearby car drivers, a car that somehow did not have that issue becoming dominant would lead to people feeling more comfortable cycling).