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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

#481

Post by djsumdog »

> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.

We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...

Self driving car research is asinine. It won't even being to solve the transport problem in America and it's round-peg/square-hole tech. It has the cool factor but there are existing tech that are insanely more useful for a fraction of the cost. American hate public transportation (thanks GM) that we'll never see real/good transport implemented in America.

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

#482

Post by dang »

thereare5lights wrote: post #402
apeace wrote: post #366

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…

> Can't we do better? no. there's a reason our community has the reputation of being heartless. it's because it's true.

It's not at all true. People here care very much. It would be weird if a large population sample (4M a month or so) had a different human nature than humans in general.

What is true is that large internet forums suffer from systemic effects that compound into problems that no one has yet figured out how to deal with.

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

#483

Post by milankovic »

nonbel wrote: post #461
apeace wrote: post #366

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…

Reminds me about this comment a few weeks ago (which made an impression on me) : > 'How low has the SW development bar gone, if "it's okay" now means "at least it's not directly killing people"?' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16541235 We now see the standard has slipped to: "Is the death of one person relatively so bad? People die every day." Next a large crowd of people will be killed and the standard will be…

Interesting, isn't it?

But if you think about it, that's not a pattern anyone should be unfamiliar with. History is full of it.

I don't know, I really have no strong opinion here. But I think stuff like this is truly fascinating. There seems no end to where rationalization can go.

Welcome to the ambivalence of reality...

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

#485

Post by dsfyu404ed »

bobthepanda wrote: post #274
Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maximizin…

Indeed. This is why many cities are reducing speed limits. In fact, self-driving cars may actually improve the situation if cars actually start complying with speed limits en masse.

>Indeed. This is why many cities are reducing speed limits. In fact, self-driving cars may actually improve the situation if cars actually start complying with speed limits en masse.

The vast majority of people just go however fast they feel comfortable (considering conditions, etc) regardless of the speed limit.

Mixed traffic speeds decrease safety.

Raising speed limits so that you don't have the % of people who comply with the letter of the law traveling slower than the people who go however fast they're comfortable usually improves safety.

Unless your goal is to increase ticket revenue or appease the "think of the children crowd" there's no point to lowering speed limits. It doesn't do much to affect traffic speed. To do that you have to modify the road or do something to change the traffic flow.

Self driving cars will improve safety because they'll result in political pressure to raise speed limits to match reality and they'll make dynamic speed limits more practical.

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

#486

Post by phyzome »

remind_me_again wrote: post #116

What I don't get is that if this is a test car, how come the the driver did not take over the helm immediately. The driver in that car should be in full alert as if driving the vehicle himself and jump in as needed. Test should not mean to let loose an autonomous car.

Do you think you could maintain the required state of alertness, focus, and engagement necessary to hit the brakes and turn the wheel after 30 minutes (or whatever) of just sitting passively as the car drove you around?

I don't think the "safety drivers" do much other than provide liability-shifting for the company.

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

#487

Post by tboughen »

zkms wrote: post #396
jdietrich wrote: post #185

Earlier 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…

> 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 holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to…

I think you touched on the fundamental reason self driving cars cannot currently do this. It would mean programming self driving cars to, in some circumstances, break the law.

I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.

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

#488

Post by stefano »

jessaustin wrote: post #437
orbitur wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If that's bad, what happens when the robocars get hacked?

Like we have botnets made out of thousands (millions?) of compromised computers, we could have entire fleets of compromised cars, rentable on the black market using cryptocurrency, that could be used to commit crimes (e.g. homicide) while keeping the killer anonymous.

Scary stuff. I hope these self-driving cars will be able and designed to work while completely offline, with no built-in way to ever connect to a network. But given the biggest player in the field seems to be Google, they'll probably be always connected in order to send data to the mothership and receive ads to show you.

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

#490

Post by jessaustin »

zkms wrote: post #396
jdietrich wrote: post #185

Earlier 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…

> 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 holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to…

This is a good point. Robocars will have more evidence for their defense in such a case than human drivers would have. "Oh there was a kid who jumped out? And that's why you plowed into this parked car? Likely story!"
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