Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by danso » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #530

The title here should be amended to “...hits, kills jaywalking pedestrian...”. Let’s get the facts straight. This person was walking outside the crosswalk. The fact that a computer was behind the wheel is irrelevant. A human broke a law designed to prevent this exact scenario, and the result was both predictable and tragic. It’s terrible, but ultimately the person’s fault.

It's "predictable" that jaywalking will lead to death? That a killed/injured pedestrian was jaywalking can be used in defending the motorist in court. But the vehicle code and road infrastructure does not assume that `jaywalking == death sentence`. Drivers deal with jaywalking every single day -- if death was to be expected, driving and jaywalking laws and regulations would be much, much different than they are now.

The fact that a computer was behind the wheel is the most important factor in this discussion, because the argument for self-driving vehicles is that they, unlike humans, can react to abnormal situations such as jaywalking.

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

#542

Post by odammit » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #159

odammit wrote: post #41

Curious how the numbers work out of number of miles [1] to number of deaths of autonomous vs standard vehicles. I know the scale is different but since this is the first death I’m curious if the percents fall in line. [1] is distance the right metric?

This is an interesting metric. Although self driving test cars are rare, the whole point of their existence is to drive so they probably clock more hours than a normal car. About 5400 pedestrians are killed each year in the US. US drivers go 3.1 trillion miles a year. So they kill a pedestrian about every 5.7 billion miles. Last November, Waymo said they had 4 million self driven miles, so well short of statistically…

Wow.

If deaths are broken out by pedestrian vs passenger, I wonder how people will respond if safety skews heavily towards one of those groups with self driving cars.

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

#543

Post by gowld » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

biggc wrote: post #94

timmaah wrote: post #32

The video mentions she was on a bike and shows a mangled bicycle. Also the line markings on the street indicate there is a bike lane to the left of a right turn lane. Definitely very bad. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4369934,-111.9429875,3a,75y,...

That bike lane is just a shoulder with bicycle symbols painted in it and it looks terrifying.

How about a "sharrow", where cyclists drive right-of-center, in hopes of avoiding the "parked car door lane", and encouraging drivers to cross the double-yellow to overtake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_lane_marking

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

#544

Post by IncRnd » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #520

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

You can't prove a negative and should be careful about promising what may turn out to be false. There is potentially quite a bit of money to be made by people with the auto version of slipping on a pickle jar. When there is money to be made, talented but otherwise misguided people apply their efforts.

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

#545

Post by wastedhours » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #533

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.…

Rails don't work for the last mile. The great thing about cars is that they don't suffer from the last mile problem. It seems like a much better plan is to separate drivers from other people more rigorously, and maybe mandate people drive the last-mile themselves (with AI help, obviously).

Rails definitely do work well for the last mile in very developed cities (i.e. London), but it's probably an unsustainable infrastructure cost for most places. That being said, it's easy to just change where that last mile is in the future (i.e. mixed zoning, flexible working environments, increasing mega-cities etc...).

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

#546

Post by floatrock » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

> Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system.

Interesting way of putting it. Kinda echos the "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" sentiment from the financial crisis.

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

#547

Post by amdavidson » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

Moter8 wrote: post #334

TheGRS wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.

Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.

It wasn't but it increasingly is getting to that point. You take off (with fly by wire adjustments from the computer) from Airport A and tell it to fly to Airport B and it can even automatically land there.

Some airlines do not allow pilots to manually fly above 3k feet, nor allow first mates to land manually[0].

0: https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-autonomous-plane-autopilo...

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

#548

Post by liquidcool » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

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.…

I would love public transportation like I've experienced it in Europe, but train tracks have exceptionally tight tolerances and high costs to build/maintain vs. roads. I hope Musk will fix this, but probably not before "good enough" self-driving cars arrive. Also, trains get into accidents pretty regularly. First Google hit:

According to the US Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-car crashes each year in the United States, most of which occur at railroad crossings. These accidents cause 600 deaths and injure about 2,300.

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

#549

Post by gowld » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

Jack000 wrote: post #237

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

Engineering for safety is about testing, not manufacturing quality. Or course you need to build quality in order to pass tests, but perfection is not a goal of any component. Tests measure quality, and failsafes and control layers reduce failure rates.

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

#550

Post by amelius » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

pps43 wrote: post #456

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…

> Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror? In Black Mirror, all cars in the world will simultaneously swerve into nearby pedestrians, buildings, or other cars.

That could happen during a massive, remotely-triggered software update.