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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

#211

Post by dws »

aetherson wrote: post #77
leggomylibro wrote: post #9

FTA: "The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. ... Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel." That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when some…

I have seen no evidence that any autonomous vehicle currently deployed can react faster than an alert and aware human. The commentariat tends to imagine that they can, and it's certainly plausible that they may eventually be. But I've never seen anyone official claim it, and the cars certainly don't drive as though they can quickly understand and respond to situations.

I live and commute in Waymo country, and see evidence of quick reactions, though I can't say for sure whether it's an alert human taking over. Mostly, the Waymo vehicles still drive conservatively.

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

#212

Post by username223 »

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,...

This design seems pretty common in the US. Some bike lanes on major streets in LA are like this, except there they also have to contend with buses pulling into stops. Biking on those streets would be terrifying, but I saw people doing it.

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

#213

Post by pishpash »

w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

How about not testing it on the unpaid public in incremental patches like this age of software "engineering" has decided it was a good idea to do?

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

#214

Post by dwaltrip »

justboxing wrote: post #108

Have to quote Prof. Teddy here. Context: How new technology is introduced on public streets and we have no choice or say on whether we want it or not, even if it endangers us and gets us killed. > When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automo…

This is a great point. Note, though, this is not new.

It's been been happening since the invention of the first tool. Stone weaponry, agriculture, and so forth, all became largely non-optional after their introduction.

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

#215

Post by recursive »

golergka wrote: post #192
gaius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

Would they do it enough times for such observation to have any statistical significance?

That misses the point. If you designed a bridge, and you died if it failed in one trial, how would this affect your design process?

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

#216

Post by Axsuul »

gamblor956 wrote: post #132
3pt14159 wrote: post #93

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…

This didn't need to happen. It's indefensible that it did. And there's still no proof that self-driving cars are safer than humans when confronted with novel situations, i.e., the situations most likely to result in injuries and fatalities. If anything, the evidence thus far is that self-driving cars are more dangerous than ones driving by humans.

How are we to judge that self-driving cars are more dangerous from simply one death?

The proper comparison to be made should be between miles driven from autonomous vehicles vs. those of humans and then looking at the incident rates.

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

#217

Post by austinhutch »

There may be no company I trust less to be open and honest about this than Uber. The arms race between companies will likely keep the most important lessons from this event proprietary. I'm very much not looking forward to hearing execs answer for this as I'm sure it will have the same amount of humanity as the rest of their comms.

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

#218

Post by dsacco »

justboxing wrote: post #108

Have to quote Prof. Teddy here. Context: How new technology is introduced on public streets and we have no choice or say on whether we want it or not, even if it endangers us and gets us killed. > When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automo…

> When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional.

This is offtopic, but I am reminded of how Slack initially supported IRC gateways and recently discontinued them.

It’s not a percect likeness to this quote’s point. But I think it’s interesting this pattern of initially optional technology, then de facto standardized technology emerges ubiquitously.

I suppose it’s arguable that embrace, extend and extinguish is the purposeful, deliberate manifestation of this pattern, arbitrated by a single entity (i.e. a company with a new technology).

Edit: Jeez an immediate downvote? The comment was barely posted a minute ago :)

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

#219

Post by falcolas »

macintux wrote: post #173
smallgovt wrote: post #111

Not to dismiss the tragedy of this incident, but it should be expected that self-driving cars kill pedestrians -- just at a rate lower than what's expected from human drivers. Perhaps there's a better metric to look at, but I'd like to see number of deaths caused per miles driven. If Uber's self-driving cars are killing more pedestrians than a human driver would, we have a huge problem, but I'd be willing to bet they…

Fewer people will die (probably). The problem is that different people will die, and you can't celebrate with the families of the people who were slated to die and didn't.

And different people will "kill". It won't be the drunk drivers, or the road ragers, or the people texting on phones, it will be anyone unfortunate enough to be in the car at the time. A businessman. A politician. A cop. A teacher.

And to say that "it's not their fault" and "it could have happened to anyone" will be cold comfort to those who just watched their car mow down an innocent, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

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