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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

#91

Post by admax88q »

ocschwar wrote: post #62
_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.

" 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 think it's time to point out the obvious, and require that autonomous cars apply the brakes first, and THEN require driver intervention. And that they be a whole lot quicker to err on the side of braking. Cameras getting fuzzy ? Slow down. Your ML algor…

Nothing I love more than HackerNews armchair engineering.

It's not that simple, you're assuming the car even had some indication that something was wrong. For all we know the car's vision was showing high confidence it saw an open road.

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

#92

Post by barkingcat »

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…

Their San Francisco testing program didn't even have a license to test because they didn't want to pay for a permit.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14698902/uber-self-drivin...

Nothing to revoke if they never had a license to begin with!

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

#93

Post by 3pt14159 »

Look, I'm all for taking self-driving cars seriously. I've written about how they're effectively WMDs if the software update computer gets owned. I've also frequently commented about the unethical practices that Uber has taken in the past.

That being said, let's not over-react. This is a single death. These are going to happen. Right now self-driving cars are essentially teenagers learning how to drive. En mass there is going to be a death here or there, but, also en mass, we're going to have a permanently safer road once they've learned, if we can secure them from cyber attack.

Try to avoid all-or-nothing thinking here. Definitely advocate for regulations, and maybe Uber wasn't safe enough, but people are either going to die from self-driving cars or they're going to die from self-driving cars taking too long because of public outrage.

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

#94

Post by biggc »

timmaah wrote: post #32

The video mentions she was on a bike and shows a mangled bicycle. Also the line markings on the street indicate there is a bike lane to the left of a right turn lane. Definitely very bad. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4369934,-111.9429875,3a,75y,...

That bike lane is just a shoulder with bicycle symbols painted in it and it looks terrifying.

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

#95

Post by simias »

bkohlmann wrote: post #25
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.

If that's something the software can't handle well then it's going to be a huge problem in many parts of the world. In many places in Europe, Africa and Asia for instance pedestrians will cross anywhere and everywhere at any time.

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

#96

Post by dmix »

bitL wrote: post #74
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…

We should wait for the results of investigation first. It could easily happen the killed person did some bonehead move that resulted in unavoidable crash. I was once told how a friend of mine fatally hit an older man that decided to cross the highway quickly, giving him no chance to react and a life-long trauma.

Calls to wait for facts never stopped the internet outrage machine in the early moments of news release. I doubt it will do much here, sadly. But it's worth pushing back against, even if it won't work IMO.

People will always relish in their biases being confirmed... even after a rare one-off event with a sample size of 1 in a burgeoning industry.

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

#97

Post by bmm6o »

itamarst wrote: post #16

The video says bicyclist and shows a bent bicycle. So pedestrian or bicyclist?

I've heard that police reports often refer to all non-drivers as "pedestrians", even if they were riding a bike (which I learned after a neighbor was killed while riding a bike). I don't know if this is legalese or police jargon, but either way you would hope a journalist who covers these things could translate.

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

#98

Post by wongarsu »

orliesaurus wrote: post #49

Not to be the guy who says "I TOLD YOU SO" but it had to happen at some point, sadly & unfortunately - if this is the first (known) case of A.I. controlled cars killing humans, the number of casualties can only grow from now onwards

Every year between 30000 and 40000 Americans are killed in car accidents. With more self-driving cars on the road it comes as no surprise that self-driving cars will cause some of them.
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