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

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

#561

Post by bertomartin » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:41 PM UTC

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…

Seems like you're jumping to conclusions here. Let's wait to see what exactly happened. I highly doubt that any of these companies just use "straight" ML. For complex applications, there's generally a combination of rules-based algorithm and statistical ML based ones applied to solve problems. So to simply: highly suspect predictions aren't just blinded followed.

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

#562

Post by wiz21c » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:41 PM UTC

I once read somewhere that privacy issues (which are very important to us, IT people) were not treated enough because they didn't have enough blood on their hands.

At least with automated cars, there will be blood.

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

#563

Post by obastani » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

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…

Very little of what goes into a current-generation self-driving car is based on machine learning [1]. The reason is exactly your point -- algorithmic approaches to self-driving are much safer and more predictable than a machine learning algorithms.

Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road. The extent to which machine learning is used is to classify whether each obstacle is a pedestrian, bicyclist, another car, or something else. By doing so, the self-driving car can improve its ability to plan, e.g., if it predicts that an obstacle is a pedestrian, it can plan for the event that the pedestrian is considering crossing the road, and can reduce speed accordingly.

However, the only purpose of this reliance on the machine learning classification should be to improve the comfort of the drive (e.g., avoid abrupt braking). I believe we can reasonably expect that within reason, the self-driving car nevertheless maintains an absolute safety guarantee (i.e., it doesn't run into an obstacle). I say "within reason", because of course if a person jumps in front of a fast moving car, there is no way the car can react. I think it is highly unlikely that this is what happened in the accident -- pedestrians typically exercise reasonable precautions when causing the road.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zkolter/pubs/levinson-iv2011.pdf

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

#564

Post by bduerst » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

iliis wrote: post #538

ttoinou wrote: post #520

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 Shouldn't be an issue with 3D cameras

Well, in that case a non-textured or reflective clothing could have a similar effect.

Wouldn't LIDAR pick it up still?

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

#565

Post by gowld » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

oldgradstudent wrote: post #473

nodesocket wrote: post #8

Striking a pedestrian in a crosswalk is horrible and terrible news. The reality though is how many pedestrians are hit by manual driver's vs automous drivers? On a percentage basis I gotta believe autonomous cars are orders of magnitude safer. Self driving cars aren't going to be perfect. How many people lost their lives in early factories to machines during the industral revolution? Imagine if they had pulled the pl…

The problem is that you 'believe' it to be orders of magnitude safer. How about we test it properly before allowing it on public roads?

How do you test it not on a public road?

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

#566

Post by rocqua » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

cubano wrote: post #367

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…

Don't we already have a huge infrastructure of police, the courts, and insurance companies in place to decide these very things everyday? I mean, how is this different then all of the other accidents that occur every day? Yes a self-driving car is involved, but do people really think autonomous cars aren't going to be involved in fatal accidents? Of course they are...but I've always thought that autonomous vehicles o…

For the same reason we don't leave the investigation of plane-crashes to the attorney general and the courts. We care about more than 'who should we punish for this' in this case.

We want to know what happened, how it happened, how we could have prevented it, how likely it is to happen again, what assumptions or overlooked details lie at the heart of this.

The required level of expertise, effort and precision here are higher than in a regular traffic accident. Moreover, the required skill-set, knowledge base, and willingness to work in a new area here make this an exceptional case.

Finally, the outcome of this will be much more than liability in a single case. This could set the precedent for an entire field of industry. This could be the moment we find out self-driving cars are nearly a pipe-dream, or it could be the moment we kill self-driving cars at the cost of millions of preventable traffic accidents. This investigation just might determine a lot, again, that makes it exceptional.

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

#567

Post by IncRnd » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

rjvir wrote: post #221

w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

> Why would Uber agree to such regulations?

Uber doesn't get to pick and choose what regulations they wish to follow.

> Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

That sounds quite negligent and a cause for heightened repercussions if anything happens.

The strange attitude you display is the _reason_ there are regulations.

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

#568

Post by amelius » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:44 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…

Perhaps companies need to test their safety devices first. I.e., first prove that their LiDAR correctly identifies pedestrians, cyclists, etc. From there, build test-vehicles with redundancy, e.g. with multiple LiDAR devices. Then prove that the vehicles actually stop in case of emergency. And only then actually hit the road.

Of course, the US department of transportation should have set up proper certification for all of this. They could have easily done so because they can arbitrarily choose the certification costs.

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

#569

Post by gfodor » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

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…

Do you have any experience developing autonomous driving algorithms? Because you are making a lot of broad claims about their characteristics that only someone with a fairly deep level of expertise could speculate about.

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

#570

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:45 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.…

[deleted]