I live in SF and have experience taking cruise rides so I can provide some (obviously anecdotal) information. Overall I'm a big fan of the autonomous vehicles companies but there are downsides with their current abilities. Pros: - As mentioned in the article, the cars generally follow traffic laws. I see a lot of drivers run red lights around my apartment, but at this point I'm fairly confident that a Cruise won't accidentally run a light and hit me. The article starts with a story of a Cruise ignoring dangerous road conditions and caution tape, but that behavior could be hopefully be fixed by working with SDC companies to standardize how road hazards are marked. - They're electric. We've got some serious climate issues to deal with and if these companies can give people more non-ICE ride options, then I think we should be working to normalize them. I feel similarly about the electric scooters in the city. - There's no one in them but me. I definitely fall in the camp of people that prefer not to have to talk to my Uber/Lyft drivers so that's a plus in my book. I also like the tagline mentioned in the article that the cars never drive drunk, drowsy, or distracted. I don't have to worry about who my driver is or what state of mind they're in. - Cost. The rides are cheaper than equivalent Uber/Lyft rides in my experience. One could argue that they're going to make driving for ride-sharing companies unviable as a way to make a living, but that's true for most new automation in a given industry.

Cons: - I'm a cyclist, and I often make eye contact with drivers to ensure they're aware of me. Without a driver, there's not a good way to ensure the car knows I'm there. That being said, I've personally never had a close call with one on my bike. - As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and should be something that these companies prioritize before expanding their operating hours and range. So yeah, a couple anecdotes and thoughts from someone in the area. They're not perfect, but I think the upside potential is great and the city should be working to accommodate them and get human drivers off the roads as much as possible.

Self driving cars need fake eyeballs (just like the cars in Cars) that make eye contact.

> As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and should be something that these companies prioritize

However I also don't want them sideswiping a cyclist in a rush to get out of the way of an ambulance.

informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.

A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly show how that is not true.

Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.

I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, Seeing Like a State.

Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both machines and humans.

> Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.

There's going to have to be (or there may already be) a rule against accusing people of being ChatGPT, but I can't believe that this is an argument that the "imperfect information" that average people have about some condition or event is somehow more important than the actuality of the condition or event precisely because of how wrong average people can be?

Because voluntary cooperation? I should only be concerned with that if I'm doing PR work for these companies. It's their job to sell safety, the only thing I'm concerned with is when people are lying. Or intentionally confusing the public about some fact, polling the confused public about what they think the facts are, then reporting the poll to further confuse the fact in lieu of simply reporting the data.

At the end of the day, people always make decisions based on emotion, because every decision involves assessing risk, including the risk of things that were not thought of testing. Data only tells you about the past while decisions only affect your future.

There's a difference between making a decision based on emotion, and making a decision based on wisdom and data. Frequently, when I have a hard decision to make, I wait a while until I'm feeling "less emotional", so that my normal knee-jerk reactions don't dominate.

I have no particular data to support this, but anecdotally, my biggest issue with Cruise testing a couple years ago was that it was excessively cautious - randomly braking for no obvious reason, dithering at intersections trying to yield, that kind of thing. I could live with that.

Now (literally yesterday) a driverless Cruise car trying to make a left turn was yielding to me walking across the intersection, and then suddenly decided to go before I'd cleared the intersection. Would it have hit me if I hadn't scurried out of the way? I don't know, but it didn't inspire confidence, and it doesn't take many experiences like this to turn public opinion. Cruise in particular seems to have made their cars more aggressive in my small personal sample size.