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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

#231

Post by neaden »

rjvir wrote: post #221
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 /…

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

I guess my hopeful answer would be they start getting treated like Enron and someone high up goes to prison until they start to comply.

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

#232

Post by olympus »

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…

Could a human have reacted fast enough to stop for someone jumping out in front of them? If the person jumped out so fast that nobody could have possibly reacted in time, then it's not a stain on the technology- even with an instantaneous application of brakes, a car still takes a while to come to a stop. If the human jumped out ten seconds earlier and was waving her hands for help, then it's an issue.

"the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human"

This statement isn't really true. Do you think Uber is investing in this because it makes their passengers safer? No, they are pretty much immune to any car crashes with a human driver, the risk and insurance hit is assumed by the driver. They are doing this to save money. They don't have to pay a driver for each trip. The safety aspect is just a perk, but Uber will be pushing this full force as long as the self-driving cars are good enough.

I'm more concerned that Uber will "lose" the video evidence showing what kind of situation it was, and we'll never be able to know if a human would have had ample time to react.

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

#233

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Jagat wrote: post #168

Can we please not overreact and send the whole self-driving research down the drain? What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? When a million humans drive a car for a mile, and 1 of them results in a death, it's easy to pinpoint the blame on a "random drunk/distracted driver". How'bout start thi…

Note that the statistics we have to work with are relatively terrible. For example: Waymo's favorite statistic is "x miles driven", which is a terrible/useless statistic, because it treats all miles equally, and fails to note that the most complex driving is often short distances (intersections, merges, etc.) and doesn't account for the fact that most of those miles were repeatedly driving on a very small number of roads. But it looks good on marketing copy because it's a big number.

Additionally, our self-driving car statistics we tend to see today also tries to ignore the presence of test drivers and how frequently they intervene. As long as they can intervene, the safety record of self-driving cars is being inflated by the fact that there's a second decisionmaker in the vehicle.

EDIT: Oh, and human driving statistics are also bad because a lot of accidents don't even get reported, and then when they do get reported, a lot of it is through different insurance companies, that's before we get into nobody centrally tracking "miles driven", and that's why most statistics for human driving safety are more or less just an educated guess.

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

#234

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

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…

It'll likely never get passed, but we truly need an "acceptable death" metric to be passed to protect the companies (and apparently people too, since some in these comments what the developers held responsible) from deaths. In my opinion, a law should be passed that per mile driven, 5-10% of the current deaths per mile is allowed, and it should begin decreasing after 10 or so years to something low (maybe 1%, maybe .01%, we'd have to wait and see).

People will always make mistakes, the benefit with self driving cars however is that mistake should only be made once. Whatever bug caused it to be considered at fault can be patched and will never occur in that exact circumstance again. Meanwhile with humans you could have that same case occur over and over again.

With how much money people can win in lawsuits nowadays, all it would take is a handful of cases to totally destroy a manufacturer of self driving cars.

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

#236

Post by abalone »

It's likely this was actually a bicyclist, not a pedestrian.

The police are saying pedestrian walking outside the crosswalk but here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle: https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042

You can see it's next to a sign. That sign lets us determine exactly where it happened on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4370667,-111.9430321,3a,75y,...

It's exactly where the vehicle lane crosses the bike line approaching the intersection. Mostly likely the Uber and bike collided when the Uber was crossing into the right turn lane.

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

#237

Post by Jack000 »

df5t0rw wrote: post #109

[unconstructive but still..] So the day I could be emprisoned because of an error of coding... Like a segfault on an highway... as finally came :D Is the disclamer "no waranty of anykind" shield us from that kind of thing ? ;) (I code on some mainstream C libraries)

you already can? our lives depend on all kinds of software every day. In Canada at least you'd need a P.Eng to work on stuff that directly endanger lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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

#238

Post by __abc »

Jagat wrote: post #168

Can we please not overreact and send the whole self-driving research down the drain? What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? When a million humans drive a car for a mile, and 1 of them results in a death, it's easy to pinpoint the blame on a "random drunk/distracted driver". How'bout start thi…

The statistics may prove meaningless. It's the emotional reaction of our legislators. Take the recent legislation regarding a single killed dog by United Airlines (my condolences to the family members/owners of that dog) vs. deaths via [insert any other thing that has multiple deaths and is currently under regulated].

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

#239

Post by jonathankoren »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #227
rjvir wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

It would be required by law. Violating the law would hold corporate officers criminally responsible.

Honestly, complying with the law has never been one of Uber’s strong suits.

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

#240

Post by Johnny555 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car.

Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizing braking power through threshold braking on all 4 wheels, but it won't be dramatically different)

So even with perfect reaction times, it will still be possible for a self-driving car to hit a human who enters its path unexpectedly.

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