381–390 of 1001 posts
Self driving cars are one of the things where we absolutely cannot afford to do "move fast and break things". If there was any whiff of shortcutting, poeple need to go to jail and Uber should be bankrupted by penalties and lawsuits.
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…
> 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…
Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.
This may not have been an unexpected circumstance. The "pedestrian outside of the crosswalk" report is likely wrong. There is visual evidence that strongly supports that this was a case of the Uber hitting a bicyclist while merging into the right turn lane. Here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle (note dent on the front right of the car): https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042 The sign it is lying nex…
This is looking worse and worse for Uber.
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…
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...
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…
> 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? As of December 2017 Uber had driven 2 million autonomous miles[1]. Let's be generous and double that, so 4 million. The NHTSA reports a fatality rate (including pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers) of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five ti…
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.
> The people leading the development of these horse-drawn carriages should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by jumping in front of them on a closed test dirt-path. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public carriageways Sounds silly when compared against old tech. Accidents happen, best we can do is try to prevent them.
I'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 s…
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!
>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! JFYI, it is most probably apocryphal: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma... still it's a nice one, I have heard the same about engineers/architects in ancient Babylon and Egypt.
So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.
Moreover, the human brain won't like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: "they were struck by a drunk driver", "they were texting", "they didn't see the red light", etc. These are "normal" reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn't happen to us: "I don't drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk", "I don't text (much) while I drive", "I pay attention".
But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It'll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.