129
Move Fast and Break Nothing | Waymo’s robotaxis are probably safer than ChatGPT.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
129 points (86.9% liked)
Technology
75756 readers
1994 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I'd like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
We can dream better than this.
I for one believe we're capable of building trains
We could even call them busses
I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.
Years ago, Microsoft was doing some R&D on autonomous vehicles in a mock city built for it. Instead of each vehicle doing all of the processing, the fake city was built with wireless markers to GIVE the car the information. Like instead of having to "see" a stop sign, the stop sign told cars it was there.
It would be complicated and expensive to implement on a mass scale but I thought it was a really cool idea.
Effectively, this has been an ongoing initiative across DoTs for a long while now. The issue is that it's a hodgepodge approach baked piecemeal into various grants and other programs. But, yeah, digital, vendor agnostic, secure transit infrastructure is always on a lot of DOT folks' minds.
That test sounds like a model trainroad but for billionaires.
Sure. But it's not like the technology they developed is useless outside of an autonomous city, I'm sure they went into it knowing it would never be implemented for real.