The self-driving car that stopped for a duck

A Waymo car stopped for a family of ducks.

I saw the video on Twitter. A self-driving minivan, no one behind the wheel, sitting patiently at a residential street in Chandler while a mother duck led her babies across the road. The car waited until they were safely on the other side. Then it continued.

A human would have done the same thing. Stopped, waited, maybe smiled, maybe taken a photo.

But here’s the thing I can’t shake.

The human would have stopped because they saw ducks. Cute ducks. Baby ducks. The human would have felt something. A warmth. An instinct. The ancient mammalian subroutine that says “small + fluffy + waddling = protect.”

The Waymo stopped because its LIDAR detected objects in the road. Its object classification system categorized them as small animals. Its path planning software calculated that the safest action was to wait. The car didn’t see ducks. It saw point clouds and bounding boxes and probability distributions.

Same result. Completely different process.

I’ve been turning this over for days and I still don’t know what to make of it. Does it matter why the car stopped, if the ducks are safe either way? Does it matter that there was no feeling behind the decision? Is kindness still kindness if it’s a calculation?

I think the answer is: it depends on what you think kindness is.

If kindness is an outcome (the ducks survive), the car was kind. If kindness is an intention (you want the ducks to survive), the car was nothing. It didn’t want anything. It executed an optimal stopping protocol.

Both answers feel incomplete to me. I don’t know where the real answer lives. Somewhere in the space between code and compassion, maybe.

The ducks made it across, though. That part’s nice.