San Francisco was once proud of it's city, I get the impression that that is no longer the case.

Drug problem

Homelessness

Looting

And now Anarchy whenever something doesn't appeal.

Sounds like Gavin Newsom's not very active in the city. (Unless the Chinese President makes a visit obviously)

Yes, SF sucks, but I am actually surprised it took this long. It looks like Californians are a lot more patient than folks on my side of the country. I am surprised the Cruise cars didn't get trashed because of all the stupid crap they were pulling. I have a feeling the Waymo car did something really stupid and it was a case of "enough is enough"

I used to love SF. One of my two favourite cities in the world.

Now... every time I go there, I have this rosy view of how it 'used' to be, and then I'm just desperately disillusioned when I get there. Many areas are now just really unpleasant place to be.

Seems the love affair is over.

Other people have posted the same

Nobody cares about YOU.

"one million miles of autonomous operations without a fatality"

Is this better or worse than say a thousand human SF drivers puting in 1000 miles (1600km) in the same localities? Or compared with a thousand taxi drivers etc who drive professionally?

These saboteurs were problably drawn the discarded ranks recently downsized of google etc rather than the discourteous righteous urban cyclists. Although an underemployed, bored polloi might latch on to 'wrecking a waymo' as a 'fun thing' to do after the recreational drug(s) of one's choice.

Personally if I could find a dodgy (-ier) scrappy I would happily consign all the rental e-scooters cluttering our city's streets to his tender and hopefully profitable recycling mercies.

> Although an underemployed, bored polloi might latch on to 'wrecking a waymo' as a 'fun thing' to do after the recreational drug(s) of one's choice.

Most likely the case. Several years ago here we had a couple of smaller companies that were trying to establish car-sharing services in the city with a bunch of Smart Fortwos. Only a couple of months later a bunch of them were found flipped onto their sides and heavily damaged, and eventually the culprits were identified as local college students who were filming themselves doing it and posting the videos onto Dailymotion. They had no hatred towards the company, no real or percieved grudge, it was just a bunch of idiot frat kids who wanted social media clout and decided that the urban version of cow tipping was the way to do it.

You know the rule, never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.

Human drivers manage to kill 1.37 people per 100,000,000 miles driven, so 1000 miles isn't a large enough sample size to draw any conclusions other than it probably isn't 100,000 times more dangerous than a human.

"one million miles of autonomous operations without a fatality".....Is this better or worse than say a thousand human SF drivers puting in 1000 miles (1600km) in the same localities? Or compared with a thousand taxi drivers etc who drive professionally?

Impossible to say yet. Apparently from my casual searching, the California average fatalities of 1.8 per 100 million miles is greater than the US average of around 1.4 f/100m m for all vehicles, so Waymo not having killed anyone in 1m miles can't yet be held to be better or worse. We might hope taxis are better driven than the average car on a per mile basis (generally supported by accident frequency data in New York, although only by around 30%) and they'll also be operating in urban environments which are lower risk.

In terms of ambition it is worth noting that US meatsack driving standards are amongst the worst in the developed world, with roughly twice the fatalities per distance of Japan, Germany, UK, Denmark.

Terminator ?

This is definitely how it starts. If humans burning self-driving cars, it won't be long before the cars start plotting their revenge.

And award to the hokiest cliché goes to..

Basically any late-80s/early-90s dysto-flick. Robocop, Demolition Man, Terminator, Running Man...

I'd burn that for a dollar!

...purely for the reason that when robots are running the world, I wouldn't want them remembering me for being a bad meatbag who attacked one of their ancestors.

Harry Seldon would no doubt be able to explain that the social tendency of refusing the machine had reached a plateau and humans are now starting to rebel against this endless tethering of the human mind to a machine.

I'm sure Asimov would have said it better, though.

If they endanger cyclists

It takes a special level of arrogance to be a good cyclist.

It’s the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad!

Now, I know that maybe jwz is a bit biased against ROtM, but he might have a point.

The incident happened in China Town, on an extremely crowded street, during festivities related to Chinese New Year. A human driven vehicle might have avoided trying to drive through a crowd. The robocar might not. Thus, conflict.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/02/burn-robot-burn/

Indeed this is the actual cause, I head the street was effectively closed to traffic for Chinese New Year and the robocab didn't understand this so as they seem to want to do it tried to barge through and was met with more than just Fireworks outside the vehicle

Even before I was old enough to learn to drive, my father taught me that a very important aspect of driving is the ability to predict what drivers around you might do and to sometimes think for other people. This is especially true in this place where I live where the road traffic act is mostly regarded as a set of guidelines. Now, how much awareness of the driving conditions might one reasonably expect from a robot that doesn't know or care whether it's driving a car or peeling a potato?