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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#21

Post by bennyg »

xexers wrote: post #7
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #2

On purpose to protect something "more valuable," or on accident?

Forgive me, I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate.

They're basically asking if the car avoided doing something that would have been more destructive (e.g not hitting 2 people but only hitting one person instead). Or if there was no conflict decision making that happened and the car accidentally ran into the person and it resulted in a fatality.

- AI decides between one life lost as a better potential outcome

- AI made no decision and just happened to hurt someone

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#22

Post by delete2 »

xexers wrote: post #7
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #2

On purpose to protect something "more valuable," or on accident?

Forgive me, I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate.

Please don't, he's going to launch into some philosophical dilemma that's not relevant because these cars aren't making decisions.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#23

Post by sandworm101 »

annabellish wrote: post #12
_m8fo wrote: post #5

Obviously 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.

Which is why the machine should be backup for the always-driving human, only leaping in to correct failings.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#24

Post by reddit_clone »

Mononokay wrote: post #10
ashleyn wrote: post #6

Uber's self-driving program seems to be one of the most unethical, most poorly-run in the entire industry. There were plenty of reports before warning us of the questionable quality of their research: cars changing lanes suddenly, blowing red lights, and now one finally killed someone. Every prior incident should have been treated as a serious matter. Waymo et al has had none of these issues. Time to revoke their lic…

> Uber's self-driving program seems to be one of the most unethical, most poorly-run in the entire industry. I mean, it's Uber. I'm not sure exactly what people were expecting. Their entire schtick is being unethical and poorly-run.

Yeah. Their motto seems to be 'easier to ask forgiveness/pay fines instead of asking for permission'.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#25

Post by bkohlmann »

nodesocket wrote: post #8

Striking 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…

Doesn't mitigate the tragedy or implications for autonomy, but per the article, the pedestrian was outside the crosswalk.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#26

Post by danso »

Given that so many of autonomous car accidents logged by the California DMV seem to be the fault of the human driver trying to take control, I’m surprised that the accident here reportedly happened in autonomous mode, which for all its flaws seems to have been good at not hitting things in front of it. In fact, seems like most of the CA accidents were the autonomous car being rear ended or side hit from other cars, usually for going too slow or stopping unexpectedly.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#28

Post by hughes »

xexers wrote: post #7
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #2

On purpose to protect something "more valuable," or on accident?

Forgive me, I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate.

I think it's a reference to the imaginary trolley problem, which is often raised as an objection to self-driving capability.

The idea is that making a decision between killing one person vs killing something more valuable than one person (eg. multiple people) is something that drivers do on a regular basis. Computers may not be capable of correctly evaluating the ethics of that decision.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#30

Post by lazerpants »

_m8fo wrote: post #5

Obviously 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.

> 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.

It's also plausible that the pedestrian was at fault. Under some circumstances it would be impossible for a human driver to avoid collision with a pedestrian, this may be no different.

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