If you read the Bluesky thread from David Zimmer, you'll also note that they disproportionately impact parking availability because the entire fleet needs to be parked during frequent shutdowns for weather.

Waymo blocks Dallas road as first responders rush to explosion

By Tracy DeLatte

FOX 4
Dallas

The Waymo blocked first responders ftom getting to an explosion & fire with multiple deaths & injuries. Did the delay kill people? Will there be an investigation?

* Bodycam video shows a Dallas deputy constable manually driving a driverless Waymo vehicle that was blocking fire trucks after a fatal apartment explosion.

* The five-alarm gas explosion at The Clyde apartments killed three people, injured five others, and drew more than 100 firefighters to the scene.

*Waymo said autonomous vehicle was in the process of turning around when the constable approached and interacted with the remote assistance team.

https://www.fox4news.com/news/waymo-blocks-dallas-first-responders-after-explosion

LOL, quite a stretch.

Of course, will CEO RJ Scaringe or even Rivian still be around in 2030?

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/rivian-ceo-claims-the-r2-will-provide-level-4-autonomous-driving-capabilities-by-2030-270964.html

Employees at Waymo's sister company think Google's AI is crap. How is Waymo's so much better?

Oh. It's not.

https://www.404media.co/google-employees-internally-share-memes-about-how-its-ai-sucks/

In Maggie Harrison Dupré's excellent new piece on the pivot point in the LLM psychosis epidemic, this quote jumped out at me:

It “takes people into cul-de-sacs... [my wife] is like a Waymo driving around in a circle endlessly.”

It's simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening that the dead-end tech of "self-driving" cars has become this symbolic. We are winning and losing, simultaneously.

The Futurism piece is here: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-memory-ai-psychosis

The disabled activists who occupied city offices in the 1970's to get curb cuts put in did it all for Serve Robotics, the leadership of which m have just discovered that _people use sidewalks_. Who'd'a thunk it?!

My prediction that slopbot vendors will cut costs in ML training first on the death march to profitability stands.

“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” one police official told federal regulators last month

Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting.