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00:00New York leaders should slam the brakes on driverless cars coming to New York City.

00:05On Friday, Alphabet company Waymo was granted approval by the Department of Transportation

00:11to deploy up to eight self-driving vehicles with human co-pilots in a test run to see

00:16how the cars would handle city obstacles like jaywalkers and cyclists.

00:21Although New York state law doesn't currently allow autonomous cars that do not have a human

00:26co-pilot, some lawmakers are looking to change that, and there's currently legislation being

00:31considered in the state senate that would allow for fully driverless cars.

00:36But why?

00:37Who gains from that?

00:39These vehicles are already a big hit in cities like San Francisco, but there's still plenty

00:44of reasons to be skeptical.

00:46Proponents of driverless cars say that they're actually safer, and the vehicles do have a

00:51better track record under routine conditions.

00:54However, they're worse at making turns and are five times more likely than human drivers

01:00to crash at dawn and dusk, according to one analysis.

01:04And the idea that robot cars are largely less dangerous completely ignores the possibilities

01:10of widespread software failures or hacks or bugs.

01:14Imagine what would happen if a fleet of self-driving cars was suddenly hit by something even close to

01:20the massive crowd strike outage of 2024.

01:24It's true that human drivers make mistakes all the time, but humans can also make judgment

01:30calls based on context in a way that robots cannot.

01:34Take an incident that occurred in October of 2023, when a woman was thrown under a self-driving

01:40car, which pinned her underneath and dragged her about 20 feet because the car made a mistake

01:45and tried to perform a pullover after hitting the woman.

01:49On top of all the safety concerns, there's also the fact that we have almost 270,000 licensed

01:56taxi and for hire vehicle drivers in the Big Apple.

02:00What is New York City without its taxi drivers?

02:03On a broader scale as a society, maybe we should stop and ask ourselves what it means that we're

02:09outsourcing so much of the human experience to machines.

02:13There have been inventions throughout history that have made human life easier, but tech

02:17moves so rapidly now that we're not even stopping to ask what we're risking.

02:22It's not just self-driving cars.

02:24From letting AI think for us to replacing in-person communication and relationship with screens,

02:30we're allowing tech to slowly nudge us out of so many facets of our own lives.

02:36Silicon Valley will say this is the future, but is it a future we want?

02:41There are plenty of tasks that robots can do for us with no bad outcomes.

02:46Operating a 3,000-pound machine on busy city streets just isn't one of them.

02:51clinging Careenas

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Robot cars don't belong in NYC | Red Hot Takes

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