On the bright side, with an autonomous vehicle, an accident is a learning experience that will benefit other autonomous vehicles.
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#12Obviously more information is needed, but I thought the entire point of having a driver behind the wheel is to manually intervene to prevent this very situation? I'm very curious to see how they'll investigate this and who will be determined to be at fault (person behind the wheel or Uber). It will likely set a precedent.
Human beings simply cannot switch between "not focussed" and "in charge of a car, taken out of autonomous mode, and actively avoiding collision" fast enough to avoid most accidents, unfortunately. Neither can humans maintain the focus required to be ready to do that when 99.9% of the time they're not required to do anything.
Semi-autonomous cars have drawbacks.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#13Is this the first death ever? (Do we count Tesla's autopilot as self-driving?)
Hm, there have been other crashes where the 'driver' in the car died (I recall one where a car in autonomous mode rear-ended a truck, something about how the sensor was blinded by the setting sun? And it had alerted the driver to take control several times before the crash) but this is the first incident I can recall where a pedestrian was struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#14The second ever [1] fatal car crash involving a self-driving car. This is the first one where a third party is killed.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-dri...
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#15Important and and missing:
"[Uber] said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto"[1]
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverles...
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#16The video says bicyclist and shows a bent bicycle. So pedestrian or bicyclist?
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#17Striking a pedestrian in a crosswalk is horrible and terrible news. The reality though is how many pedestrians are hit by manual driver's vs automous drivers? On a percentage basis I gotta believe autonomous cars are orders of magnitude safer. Self driving cars aren't going to be perfect. How many people lost their lives in early factories to machines during the industral revolution? Imagine if they had pulled the pl…
yes, but with a human driver you have someone to take responsibility / punish for, what do you do with an alogrithm to provide justice?
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#18Striking a pedestrian in a crosswalk is horrible and terrible news. The reality though is how many pedestrians are hit by manual driver's vs automous drivers? On a percentage basis I gotta believe autonomous cars are orders of magnitude safer. Self driving cars aren't going to be perfect. How many people lost their lives in early factories to machines during the industral revolution? Imagine if they had pulled the pl…
It appears the woman was not using the crosswalk, but really that doesn't make much difference in the reaction to the report. Uber's self driving tech seems a bit under-baked at the moment.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#19Obviously more information is needed, but I thought the entire point of having a driver behind the wheel is to manually intervene to prevent this very situation? I'm very curious to see how they'll investigate this and who will be determined to be at fault (person behind the wheel or Uber). It will likely set a precedent.
The only way this is a reasonable failure of both the computer and the human driver is if they both physically had no time to react. Maybe that was the case, maybe it wasn't.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#20On purpose to protect something "more valuable," or on accident?
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