According to the Elon Musks of the world, self-driving cars are the future, because dreaming of a future where people might not need cars at all is too ambitious for Silicon Valley, I guess. One company leading the way is Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving car project, which operates vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix.


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Late last year, Waymo published data that demonstrated that its driverless cars were 6.7 times less likely to be involved in a crash that resulted in injury than human drivers, and 2.3 times less likely than human drivers to be in a police-reported crash. The data seems promising, but given the technology is still in its infancy, there are still a lot of kinks to work out.



Jason Carr, a digital creator who describes himself as an “ebike propagandist,” highlighted one such kink in a recent video, in which he sported a T-shirt with a stop sign printed on it in an effort to trick the driverless cars into stopping, having interpreted his T-shirt as a genuine stop sign.


Of the four tests they conducted, two during the day and two at night, the cars stopped three times, with it barreling past in just one of the nighttime tests. In the final test, the car stayed in position at the “stop” sign until Carr walked away. Carr’s theory was that in this instance, the car read him as a sign being held by a lollipop man, where the stop sign would typically be turned around to let drivers know it’s safe to proceed.



After one engineering account posted the video to Twitter, a lot of A.I.-diehards started taking offense, including one person who wrote, “I hope some of those people were rushing to an emergency, and your funny, while delightful personality, had them make everything worse!” I’m not sure I’m ready for a future where people summon driverless cars in emergencies, let alone driverless cars whose technology is still being perfected and who can be tricked by a guy wearing a T-shirt.


While this is definitely entertaining, it also isn’t likely to be a huge problem for Waymo, unless people suddenly start wearing street sign T-shirts en masse as some sort of protest against driverless cars.