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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

#551

Post by swyx »

rimliu wrote: post #205
swyx wrote: post #157

I'm saddened by this incident but have thought a lot about this eventuality. there are a few levels of societal acceptance of self driving car death outcomes i can think of: A - Human equivalent: self driving car obeys reasonable rules that a human also would eg minimum speed on a highway and kills someone B - Trolley problem: (very artificial scenario) self driving car has to choose between killing N or M people whe…

How does it work out? I mean you got a situation wher SDC kills someone where no human driver would, but somehow it gets safer?

yes, because in aggregate the deaths are still reduced. we need society to get past individual death stories (which are very sad and we should do everything we can to prevent it) and not let them distract from the overall need for SDCs

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

#552

Post by CalRobert »

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).

For what it's worth, it doesn't really need to. Feet work well for the last half mile or so, and a well-designed city can get stops this close.

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

#553

Post by gowld »

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.

A test pseudo-"driver" ought to be doing stuff like orally making notes of the environment and car operation, collecting data the sensors might be missing, and monitoring the car's automated judgement. As a related effect, the human should be ready to emergency brake or swerve.

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

#554

Post by DanielleMolloy »

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 don’t oppose public transport at all and the US has a lot to improve in this area. But e.g. East Asia and Europe have plenty of rails, and people still want to drive their own cars, and there are still an unbelievable number of accidents.

We should require that every traffic participant gets a sensor, and connect all in a (local) network, instead of only relying on machine learning and its vulnerability to the unpredictable situations where accidents occur. Pure autonomous self driving won’t be the final answer here.

Please correct me if I’m not up to date here, but to my last knowledge self driving car machine learning lacks the most important data, that of dangerous situations. I’m surprised that Uber considered it ready for roll out.

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

#555

Post by gowld »

phyzome wrote: post #486
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.

the drivers are employed by the company, doing company work. They may (misleadingly) shift the optics away from the automation, but they don't shift the liability.

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

#556

Post by downandout »

danso wrote: post #541
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.…

It’s predictable that when you (illegally) put yourself in harm’s way, you might be harmed or even killed. This was a terrible outcome, but it’s no more the fault of the computer that was driving the car than it would have been if it were a human driver. If I go walking into traffic, as a logical person, I fully expect to be hit and injured or killed. The most important laws where jaywalking is concerned are not traffic laws, but rather the laws of physics.

Thankfully this is not the outcome of each and every jaywalking incident, but it is a possibility with all of them. That’s the risk you consciously accept when you walk in front of moving vehicles that weigh thousands of pounds.

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

#557

Post by skookumchuck »

awakeasleep wrote: post #411
skookumchuck wrote: post #374

If human driven cars kill 1000 people a year, and autonomous cars kill 100, will it be politically unacceptable to switch to autonomous? I suspect it will be.

A portion of that depends on the funding on either side of the issue. If the autonomous cars kill 1100 per year, but autonomous car companies fund a bunch of studies saying the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, it'll be politically acceptable.

People think emotionally, not rationally. People have all sorts of greatly distorted views on the risks of various activities.

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

#558

Post by dpark »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #446
leggomylibro wrote: post #9

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…

>> Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads. They're on public roads because they've decided that deploying their tech is more important than safety. I don't see any other explanation. We know that it's pretty much impossible to prove the safety of autonomous vehicles by driving them, so Uber (and almost everyone else) have decided that, well, t…

That report ends by saying essentially, "it may not be possible to prove the safety of self-driving cars". [1] So the value here is questionable and the same logic could apply to anything with a low frequency of occurrence. The value of air bags by this measure was not proven until they were already mandated.

[1] "even with these methods, it may not be possible to establish the safety of autonomous vehicles prior to making them available for public use"

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

#559

Post by basura045478 »

orbitur wrote: post #421
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, 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…

will never happen. least not with any explicit depth sensors. any car with lidar has depth perception orders of magnitude better than yours and would never chase an object merely because it resembles road markings

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

#560

Post by rhizome »

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).

San Francisco used to have rail streetcars all over the city, many more than the 6 lines now.
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