A stalled Cruise robotaxi blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle to the hospital in an Aug. 14 incident, according to first responder accounts. The patient later died of their injuries.
“The patient was packaged for transport with life-threatening injuries, but we were unable to leave the scene initially due to the Cruise vehicles not moving,” the San Francisco Fire Department report, first reported by Forbes, reads. “The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable.”
The question I see unanswered is whether the victim had survivability under any circumstances.
Very hard to tell if 90 seconds is life or death. Every second counts but if they made it to the ER with a minute and a half to spare I don’t know if they would have had enough time for meaningful intervention.
I’m not sure that’s an important question. In my view, even if it turned out correct, “This particular victim would have died anyway, so delaying emergency vehicles is fine” is a logical fallacy, an ethical error and a failure of empathy.
Proximate cause is an important part of legal theory and extremely important in deontological ethics. You’re way off base if you think it’s not important.
You are clearly a Very Intelligent Expert and a Wise and Knowledgeable person, so I must bow to your greater, deeper and fuller understanding.
I was weak, pathetic and stupid for thinking that the safety concerns this raises were more important than the technicalities of this individual case. Please accept my humble apologies. I’m sure you’ll have further corrections for my naive fumblings and I await your Academic Input eagerly.
It’s frankly incredible how many people pretend to miss the forest for the trees. Who do they think they’re fooling? It’s embarrassing lol.
Ok.
Ah and now you beat me in debate by writing a shorter answer without giving credibility to my main point by engaging with it in any way. You’re such a winner.
Ok.
Also, the article had virtually no information on the actual incident. As far as I can see, the only information is: “a pedestrian hit by a vehicle”. But, this is a case of a human driver causing such a serious injury to a pedestrian that the pedestrian died.
99.9% of the blame for the death of this pedestrian is due to the human driver who hit them. 0.1% of the blame is the self-driving cars which may (or may not) have delayed the ambulance slightly.
I understand why the focus of the article is the self-driving cars. But it is a tragedy how often human drivers kill pedestrians, cyclists, other drivers, etc.