Waymo acknowledges its vehicle hit a San Francisco corner store cat

31 pointsposted a day ago
by bryan0
(sfgate.com)

10 Comments

anon7000

a day ago

Good thing humans never ran over a beloved pet :)

Jk, I think my family alone had about 5 animals die to humans driving cars. (Very rural area with a mostly quiet road. A number of these were stray cats, can’t really control where they go.)

“Kill a Waymo! Save a cat“ Kill a human save a cat? The outrage is misdirected

lm28469

21 hours ago

Humans don't have 360 degree lidar with 2000 times the compute power we used to send people on the moon though

AlotOfReading

21 hours ago

Incredibly, you're underestimating the computational power of both autonomous vehicles and human brains. A modern smartphone is more than 2000x the Apollo Guidance computer. A Waymo is significantly more powerful than that. A human brain is tens of trillions of times more powerful than the AGC, assuming somewhat low estimates.

lm28469

20 hours ago

Unless your head can spin 360 degrees at 1000hz it doesn't matter if your brain is "more powerful" in some abstract measure

ricardobeat

20 hours ago

How does that help seeing under the chassis/wheels?

That extra power might mean seeing something move in your peripheral vision, intuit that it might be a cat, predict its path in space, and that it may have put itself under the car because that’s something cats usually do. The LiDar achieves nothing compared to this.

cut3

20 hours ago

A waymo ran over my skateboard so it makes sense they run over skateboard sized animals

guywithahat

21 hours ago

> the robotaxi company has acknowledged the death but stopped short of claiming responsibility

Which is probably accurate, cats are notorious for darting into traffic, and in this case the cat ran under the car while it was pulling away. While I would like autonomous vehicles to be better than us, the responsibility lies in the store owner who let their cat play in the street