Technology

I mean, it sucks for the cat and the neighborhood, I'm glad that where I live there are a few very friendly outdoor cats and I've always seen people nail the brakes to avoid them the few times they cross the road.

I also understand that autonomous cars kind of need more work, but real drivers also really suck at driving. I wonder if the ire here is more at "who do we blame if no driver"

Also also, I wonder if electric cars are going to cause a lot more issues for outdoor animals who to some extend get trained to listen for a Hrududu which the electric motors don't make.

Under- car sensors is a great idea and the kind of innovation required for this tech to reach universal adoption. Waymo is already safer than human drivers IMO but let's keep going until it's significantly safer with verifiable data and capabilities humans cannot have. And we have to address its connection to big tech for "safety under fascism" purposes.

Then again, the human passengers didn't see it either.

The human passengers weren't responsible for driving the vehicle, their lack of awareness is a feature of getting a taxi ride?

Yeah this is the kind of thing where you really need statistics. This sticks out because it's a prominent example of something new, an autonomous vehicle, doing something notable - killing an animal for the first time (or at least one of the very first well-publicized times on record).

For people's reaction to this to be that this is because it's an autonomous vehicle is the same sort of cognitive bias that causes things like, " The first person to get a math problem wrong in class was a girl so it seems like girls are bad at math". When of course it could be that the probability of boys and girls getting problems wrong is equal, and that the girl was simply the first one to get a unlucky roll on the dice of the universe. It could even be that boys are more likely to get problems wrong, and the girl was especially unlucky. It could in fact be that girls are more likely to get problems wrong, too, but this single instance doesn't give us enough evidence for that. It could be that boys actually have gotten more problems wrong, but we only hear about the girl getting the problem wrong due to sociological biases, or vice versa. Etc.

I get that we shouldn't trust corporations, and it's not fun to defend a corporation, but it is important to defend rational thinking. And the rational way to approach this is to employ statistical methods to judge whether a vehicle being autonomous truly makes it a bigger risk to animals in the road or not. Any other line of reasoning is not right for this kind of problem.