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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

#511

Post by TN412 »

djsumdog wrote: post #481

> 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.…

>We Should really just build rails

The beauty of cars vs rails is that cars can go more than just a set in stone angle or path defined by a rail. Cars can go in and out of parking lots and dirt roads. Rails would be more automated, yes, but not as versatile.

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

#512

Post by nopriorarrests »

drcode wrote: post #500
nopriorarrests wrote: post #455

I wonder how this will be treated legally. Police can't just write "killed by python script" as a cause of death, that would be crazy, and there is no legal framework for cases like that. My guess is that A.I. could be equated to cruise-control, meaning person behind the wheel is responsible. Maybe someone knows better?

People are injured by malfeasance of a corporation involving many employees all the time, such as when a bridge collapses- There is nothing that says a police person needs to immediately find a single guilty person 10 minutes after an accident like this.

I agree, for large engineering projects, such as bridges and buildings, obviously many employees are involved and in many cases you can't even single out someone who is responsible.

But, to my best knowledge, there are no "corporations" on the road. No matter what company this person is driving for and under what type of contract, this person is responsible for all kinds of incidents.

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

#513

Post by lucb1e »

alyx wrote: post #393
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…

I find what might help those that quote statistics is to self-reflect and ask the question, how would you react if your father/mother/sister/son/daughter/etc was the victim? Would you care that statistically self-driving cars have killed less people than human drivers?

> how would you react if your father/mother/sister/son/daughter/etc was the victim?

Shit, of course. But I'd like to believe that I'll realize that banning self-driving cars is not going to make things any better, just like I'd never propose banning cars in general. I'm not sure how it would help here to imagine it's my daughter; it's not as if we imagine it being our daughter in every traffic accident we hear of, since that would be crippling given the sheer number of them...

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

#514

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#515

Post by lhorie »

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…

What bothers me is that people are jumping at all sorts of narratives and conclusions when the article clearly pointed out that the incident is still under investigation.

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

#516

Post by pdabbadabba »

untog wrote: post #311

This 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…

NTSB has already announced that it will investigate: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/ubers-fatal-self-driving-c...

I guess we'll find out how competent they are at this, but I think they did a surprisingly good job with the previous Tesla investigation: https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/hitlist.cfm?docketID=5998...

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

#517

Post by bargl »

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…

I think the argument needs to be made for ETHICAL development of mission critical software. The Aerospace industry has been writing software that has peoples lives in their hands for years. NASA has been doing the same.

We need to see accountability for any death caused by a car being operated by a computer. We need to see integrity in testing and metrics that show that these are actually safer for humanity. One more death than expected due to software vs human is too many.

I don't remember where I saw it but the process for creating mission critical software at NASA is insane. They analyze everything. It's a completely different and slower process than the one we use for building websites. SpaceX has probably increased the productivity of said systems, but I'd like to see how they develop mission critical software to keep things safe.

The point of self driving cars is to reduce death, if you can monetize that great, but if you can't hit that baseline in some sort of testable way, then you shouldn't be able to put your car on the road.

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

#519

Post by savanaly »

_m8fo wrote: post #5

Obviously more information is needed, but I thought the entire point of having a driver behind the wheel is to manually intervene to prevent this very situation? I'm very curious to see how they'll investigate this and who will be determined to be at fault (person behind the wheel or Uber). It will likely set a precedent.

If humans can't prevent themselves from having accidents 100% of the time when they're in total control of the vehicle, why should we expect they could prevent an accident 100% of the time when they're in partial control of the vehicle?

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

#520

Post by ttoinou »

IgorPartola wrote: post #390

This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…

    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
Shouldn't be an issue with 3D cameras
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