As the spokesperson put it, the robot’s actions may legally constitute fleeing the scene of a traffic incident, meaning Starship Technologies could very well be on the hook for the incident.
I don’t understand. It darted into a moving bus regardless, even if it hadn’t fled. The bus sure as hell isn’t responsible…
“The fault lies with one of our subcontractors, one of the janitors is to blame, send him to prison. Anyway, we will keep doing business as we are a corporation and therefore a person and therefore none of us who own the company are at fault whatsoever.”
There was no actual collision
The injuries were from hitting the brakes. I’ve certainly has to brake for people and animals in the roadway before, never considered it an incident. Guess it’s different because there were injuries in the bus, which I wouldn’t have expected from just braking
Ok, but that’s still the robot’s fault. I’m sure the driver thought it was an animal or child at first. People don’t get to just wander into the road against a light.
It’s not “the robot fled”, it’s “a company put a unsafe robot onto a public street and should not be allowed to operate them at least until they’ve proven that their robots are really safe and will not flee from further accidents”
We need to hold CEOs and board members criminally liable for the shit their corporations do. Watch all sorts of bullshit just clear off the map.
So, a hit-and-run.
I think the legal principle of liability is that a company is fully liable for the damage that their products cause. “It was an automation” or “it was a robot” is not an excuse.
So, maybe the consequence should be the permanent cancellation of the driving license of the responsible persons? If nobody else, the CEO of that company?
We absolutely have to implement to hold CEOs and upper management and stakeholders accountable for what their corporations do. They always blame some subcontractor that takes the hit, pay a trivial fine that doesn’t really affect their bottom line, and keep on doing business.
Capitalism HAS to be reigned in, and personal responsibility is the way to do that in this case.
There was no collision
Robot entered the crosswalk during a no walk sign, bus fully depressed brakes to avoid collision. 9 injured in the bus as a result of full brake application. Robot continued on
Have we considered how we design cities is shit for pedestrians? Humans and robots both make this mistake
There actually was no hit. The bus slammed on the breaks. The injuries are most likely minor bumps and bruises. This article is sensationalist as fuck. This was essentially someone cutting the bus off in traffic. If it wasn’t a robot, it wouldn’t have been newsworthy.
It’s the equivalent of slamming on the brakes to avoid an animal. The dumb thing wandered into the road because it doesn’t know any better.
The difference here is people care about animals… If this sort of thing becomes common place, people will just hit the robot then sue for damage to their vehicle, since dodging it puts the liability on you.
…The fact that it WAS a fucking robot literally IS what makes it newsworthy, bro.
They caused an accident and then fled the scene, jail time seems most appropriate for the CEO and everyone underneath him who agreed this robot was fit to be out and crossing roads.
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you know how to solve this in the most effective way?
same way we solve for gun violence.
arrest and charge the person who ordered the food.
I promise after the third time, people will stop ordering food from places that use these delivery bots, eventually the companies that support them will go out of business, and nobody will ever do this again.
is it ethical? no. is it morally dubious? absolutely. will it work? 100%
downvoters can’t tell satire
I would usually say fuck cars but the headline is misleading as it was a single bus and buses are good, therefore fuck this robot in particular. And maybe the bus driver if they braked intentionally and not out of panic.
A bus driver should be able to brake without risk of mass injury. They need to review rider safety to minimize injuries
It’s stupid robots are in traffic, but that could just as easily be a small child running out
They also need to review fucking robots causing accidents in traffic.
The bigger issue here is 9 people being injured from a bus having to slam on the brakes
Seems like there is a safety review that should happen
Seriously, I don’t care what anyone says, busses should have seat belts.
We have them here in Scandinavia, and they’re technically mandatory. Nobody uses them but they’re there and encouraged to use.
What are you gonna do?
People in city buses don’t usually put on the seatbelt. If you’re going to start doling out fines for that, you’ll have a literal revolt. Though it’s been mandated for years and years.
The driver should’ve just driven over the robot without stopping though. A robot is not a human being or even an animal that there’s a moral imperative to save. Maybe it’ll teach starship to program it to not cross a pedestrian crossing when there’s a red light for pedestrians. Though I suspect there could’ve been damage to the bus’s front bumper so perhaps that would’ve been a bigger danger to his job than a few injuries.
Meh they said that about smoking too, and people stopped smoking outside. There was a revolt, then people got used to it, then they realized that yeah this is actually much better for everyone.
Oh nooo the robot was blinded by traffic lights says the company.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
It cannot be blinded. What an incredibly bold statement, unless they aim to go bankrupt soon anyway
I’m not saying the robot is “right”, but the number of people crusing around with their high beams on as a matter of corse, is as they saying goes, too damn high. So I can absolutely believe that a vehicle’s high beams limited its “vision” because that regularly happens to me driving and as a pedestrian.
Now if the robot fled the scene that’s a completely different issue for which it’s operators are responsible.
If those high beams are legal, then all that means is the robot can’t safely operate under normal/legal conditions. If it can’t operate safely, why is it allowed in public?
It’s not legal to use them in a city. If you’re blinding someone with them, it’s not legal (at least in my US state)
High beams are NOT legal in the city. And they were in all likelyhood not being used in this scenario.
Yeah, for some reason I read high beams and just thought of the bright LEDs everyone has. Either way, I agree that it doesn’t make sense to blame high beams.
I doubt the bus driver was using high beams in the city, there’s no point at these speeds and it’s illegal anyway.
I’m not saying that you’re “wrong”, but the idea of giving the benefit of the doubt to a piece of technology in service of a corporation is, as the saying goes, bonkers.
They’re too low to the ground for high beams to make a difference.
All this discussion about the safety of these bots. Has anyone considered that they’re only reading this story because this was an unusual event? If this was a normal thing, it wouldn’t be in the media.
Now consider how many more people would have been hurt by human drivers making tens of thousands of deliveries or more.
None of this deflects blame from the robot company, but we do tend to screech like monkeys over stories that are outliers. We’d never have read about this if a human driver was similarly blinded, or simply fucked up, and wrecked the bus.
You can’t just claim “Availability Heuristic” without providing any other evidence.
Additionally, a lot of people’s issue with these things is they’re operating in a legal gray zone. They’re using up pedestrian space for companies benefits.
Don’t shift the blame to bright ad boards or similar external factors. If the device can’t deal with it, it does not belong in that environment.
That’s the same reasoning that forced pedestrians out of basically every roadway
Have we considered modern urban design is terrible for pedestrians? Humans make this same mistake with regularity. We’re only able to cross roads at specific places and times that are solely designed around cars
But no, we’ll keep blaming all the people who get hit for it, as well as all the robots. Couldn’t possibly be bad design that neither humans nor robots can consistently safely cross
Completely separate discussion. Making accommodations to keep living humans safe is good and reasonable. (Keep in mind that in the pre-automobile era, there was no safe way to cross a busy street—you stepped out and hoped you didn’t get run down by a horse.) But a robot is a tool, not a person, and changes that make traffic easier to navigate for robots may be even more unhelpful for human pedestrians than the current status quo.
But also, remove bright ad boards…not for the robots though, but for the people.
No no, let’s put the blame on bright ad boards, and require cities to remove that form of advertisement. You know, for safety.
and whoever decided it did needs to be made an example of. too many people are harmed by half baked autonomous shit every day.
I hope they told their bus drivers to not brake for those robots next time. If stopping in time means putting the passengers at risk of injury, run the damn clanker over.
Just asking for them to hit a runaway stroller they mistook for a delivery robot
In split second decisions, you don’t want to run the risk that the driver thought for a moment it’s a robot and not a small kid. Safety first. Let the robot go and sue the company.
What ass backwards timeline we’re living in that we got Asimov’s three laws on backwards? That a human being cannot harm a robot? 🤬
If you’ve ever actually read any of the books you’d know that using these laws as actual laws is a dumb move. The paradoxes caused by them are a pretty central theme.
Yeah like one of the stories in i Robot, the people were going die because the robot couldn’t break one of the three rules and went haywire. Think that was the issue in most of the stories.
Latter stories had Daneel Olivaw lawyering his way around the laws. Then there was a schism where some robots thought he misinterpreted them, went too far. Then the Zeroeth law came around adding more twists.
It’s been 20-years since I read all that. Tell me if I’m wrong.
The entire damn point of the three laws is that they don’t work and cause more harm then good… The paradox of the laws is the whole point!
What paradox? I thought the rules were considered a good idea in the stories.
Lots of the Robot stories hinge on unexpected outcomes of the Three Laws, or a clever bot like Daneel Olivaw lawyering them. :)
also robots are pratically blameless, thats why they are made, so it obfuscates the true owners.
But the owner isn’t blameless. What, are robot crashes handled as natural disasters? Is this idiocracy?
Time to give every robot a license plate
people get really angry at me when I flip these things.
It’s not that easy. Running the thing over is also dangerous for the people in the bus. The driver must decide.
Hold upper management criminally liable
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If a delivery robot can’t reliably distinguish traffic lights from advertising, it’s clearly not ready for public roads. Urban environments are unpredictable by nature, not exceptional circumstances. And a software failure could affect an entire fleet, not just one robot. Autonomous delivery may have real benefits, but public safety cannot become collateral damage in the race to automate everything.
Unfortunately we may be forced to remove all advertising from public spaces to make them safer to robots.
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Soon we may be able to ban these finally
Wheres the proof its not reliable? I think there’s about a hundred of them operating in the city since at least 2022 based on what I can see. So just based on the information here I’d have to assume each one causes an accident once every (100*365*(2026-2022)) = 146000 days which seems pretty okay to me, even if its a tenth of that.
There’s a substantial difference between mitigating for errors by human drivers and accepting a percentage of undesirable behaviour as part of a system run by logic.
“Don’t worry about those other 99 time bombs! Only one has gone off so far. So if we multiply the number of days they’ve been ticking by the total number of bombs, it is clear that their explosions only happen once every four centuries!”
Idiot.
Well, you do need to consider things in context, right?
Captain_solanum is right about how math works. The thing to consider is the safety of these delivery bots relative to the alternatives. How often do delivery drivers get into/cause accidents? It’s not never, but without the actual numbers we can’t really say if these bots are more problematic.
It’s difficult to compare these two delivery methods because they’re inherently quite different, but ultimately that is what we have to do if we want to figure out which is actually more of a danger.
But accountability is really important here. If companies want to keep using tech this way, they need to be accountable for the actions of their technology. Because these devices exist in a physical world with real consequences. You cannot be allowed to get off the hook by saying “oops, just a glitch, it won’t happen again”.
Also, you called him an idiot, but you may have also missed his point. We could just not outright insult each other.
Yeah, accountability is the entire point. Are the corporations, executives, and shareholders going to be held responsible for this?
Also, every human driver is different. So it’s up to each driver as an individual to ensure they’re following traffic rules and driving safely. Human minds are also complex and capable of adapting to evolving circumstances, even at a moment’s notice, to deal with unexpected situations when they arise, such as near-miss emergencies.
Machines don’t have that; they’re algorithmic and deterministic, which means there will always be some possibility of events outside the scope of their programming.
Also, comparing the robots to human drivers isn’t a good comparison, because as far as we’re concerned the hardware and software are nearly identical between each robot. So if one of them was capable of causing a multi-vehicle accident, that means they all are.
So calculating probably using something similar to the manhours of each robot on the road is foolish. What they did was (incidents) ÷ (robots × time), to make it look like a comically small chance of having an accident.
A more accurate formula would be (1 – (incidents ÷ time))^(number of robots)^
And that gives you the probability of (time) elapsing without incident. The more robots there are, the smaller that number gets, meaning the likelihood of an accident increases with each additional robot. Not decreases.
So for example (1 – (1 accident ÷ 4 years))^(100 robots)^ = 0.75100
In other words, without a software update requiring significant technological improvements, with 100 of these robots on the road, the chances of going another 4 years without an accident is on the magnitude of 3.207 × 10^(-13)
I’ll leave you to determine what that makes the likelihood of x number of incidents per year.
You’re right that I didn’t have to call them an idiot though, I apologize for that. My temper was a bit spun up from arguing with trolls in a different thread, but I shouldn’t have let that seep out here.
Whomever allowed that robot outside is to blame. If they have grievances, they can sue whomever wrote the software or built the device. Keep sending the buck up until it reaches the top.
If i put a rock into traffic then it’s my fault. I see no difference.
The responsibility should lie with the company that decided the robot was safe enough to deploy. How it distributes liability among its developers, manufacturers and suppliers is its problem, not the public’s.
When it’s a criminal matter, the assigment of blame is absolutely a public matter. If you or I caused a car accident with irresponsible use of an RC car or a consumer drone, we would be facing criminal prosecution. The fact that no one is likely to face charges in this case is a huge failure of public policy.
💯 That’s an important distinction: Civil liability determines who pays for the damage, while criminal responsibility addresses whether someone’s negligence was serious enough to constitute a crime. And that question absolutely deserves public scrutiny. Automation must not become a shield against criminal accountability.
AI slop ass comment
only resolvable by bathing the courts in their least favorite thing; the blood of the wicked.
