Why am I not surprised Uber is the first company to kill someone. With their top notch ethics, ah. This actually makes me really angry, more than I had anticipated.
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#362Just curious: Do tech companies “pay” the state so they can try out their latest and greatest? Or do they look for states with the least amount of restrictions?
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 poi…
I've been saying this from the beginning: it's not enough for self-driving cars to be "better than the average driver". They need to be at least 10x better than the best drivers. I find it crazy that so many people think it is. First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver". Second, just like with "human-like translation" from machines, errors made by machines tend t…
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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#364Can 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…
You know how sometimes you get a gut feeling or your awareness picks up somehow? You experience it sometimes where you just happen to glance in the right direction, as a driver, and avoid horrible things from happening. Or hesitate to go through an intersection when a light turns green and some person is running a red. You and your body somehow knew but it can't be explained. Computers don't have that, whatever it is…
The thing you're describing is coincidence/confirmation bias, not a real phenomenon.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of frict…
I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car. As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.
...where breaking eggs means killing people?
There's no way for autonomous driving to become a reality without people dying?
I think we could achieve autonomous driving without needless deaths along the way. It might take longer, but I'd say it's worth it to, I can't believe I have to make this argument, avoid killing people.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#366I'm really shocked at the trend in comments here.
Yes, we get it. Fatalities will happen sometimes, they are unavoidable sometimes, and what matters in the long run is if we can achieve a significant overall reduction in fatalities.
But my god, a person was just killed by a computer. Can't we have some compassion and humility?
Let's, as a community, set the standard for how we will react to these events. Let's make sure Uber releases detailed data on what happened, whether they were at fault or not. Let's hold the media accountable for their reporting. Let's mourn the loss of life and think about how we can solve these problems.
But for christ's sake, please stop posting the same thing everybody already knows, which gets posted on HN whenever a self-driving article comes out.
Can't we do better?
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EDIT: I clarified what I meant here [1]
Wasn't trying to say this thread should be all about mourning. This is HN so we should talk about technology, even when a person died. I'm pointing out one specific argument that gets repeated over and over in place of a substantive discussion, and I think we can do better.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#367This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…
Don't we already have a huge infrastructure of police, the courts, and insurance companies in place to decide these very things everyday?
I mean, how is this different then all of the other accidents that occur every day? Yes a self-driving car is involved, but do people really think autonomous cars aren't going to be involved in fatal accidents?
Of course they are...but I've always thought that autonomous vehicles only have to be like 10% safer for them to make tons of sense to replace human drivers.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#368The reason self-driving car companies have flocked to Arizona is that Arizona chose to pretty much completely deregulate them: They don't even have to report statistics to the state like they do in California. It's unfortunate, but unsurprising, the first pedestrian killed by an experimental self-driving car allowed on public roads was in Arizona.
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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#369FTA: "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…
> 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 someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of frict…
>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic:
1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past.
2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone.
3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident.
4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible.
It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#370Not 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 .…
That sounds like the market correcting itself, while you want to protect the likes of Uber from market forces, with new laws. Putting that aside though, good luck trying to get re-elected after passing a law like that. Few people are technocratic and emotionally detached enough to agree with you, from the looks of it, not even on this site.