This seems like a good time to question if we really should have cars at all. Autonomous cars might be better in some ways but they are still tons of metal flying at high rates of speed. Accidents will happen and people and other animals will die on a regular basis. Cars also require tons of infrastructure that walking and biking don't. You also have the environmental destruction of GHG emissions and from the mining of rare metals needed for batteries, you have roads and parking lots destroying habitat and using up valuable space, air pollution and smog from tailpipes or energy generation, noise pollution, and more harmful effects. Autonomous cars might mitigate some of those things but most of it will still be there (or we'll just use cars even more and so we'll have just as many deaths total along with the rest of it?). What about doing research and testing a world without any cars? It will probably be a better one.
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#572Former 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.
Theoretically the reputation cost would discourage for-profit organizations from releasing unsafe self-driving vehicles for testing on public roads.
The ironic part here is that Uber already has a strong reputation for skirting the law and not caring. Their response and the following audits will be worth following.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#573The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.
goes to show, sdv's have to be perfect in the eyes of the public. you wouldn't seriously recommend adding a test like that to a regular driving licence.
also that testing does happen in the case of every av program i know of. closed obstacle courses with crap that pops out forcing the cars to react. look up gomentum station.
† i did it for you. http://gomentumstation.net/
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#574> 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.…
My great-grandfather was killed by a streetcar (on rails) on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#575> 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.…
Rail isn't something you can solve solely with tech, though. It requires building new infrastructure, which requires enormous political cooperation, which is an intractable problem in our current political climate. Self-driving cars do require some political cooperation, but it's much less because it purportedly doesn't require new infrastructure.
From my experience, relative to the rest of the first world, American highways and streets are dilapidated and neglected. I don’t see how that doesn’t get worse when self-driving cars start using those streets more efficiently than humans.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#576Important and and missing: "[Uber] said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto"[1] 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverles...
that's SOP for every av program. have incident? ground the fleet. doesn't matter why, or who's at fault.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#577This 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…
Or take a slow approach like Google Waymo which was almost perfect so far on the roads. Uber is rushing it, and this could cost whole industry.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#578The article says almost nothing about it other than that the pedestrian was "outside the crosswalk." But the details are what matters. Without the details it is not possible to say if striking a pedestrian was avoidable. There is also a large grey area: Could the collision been mitigated? What other risks were involved?
The bad outcome would be that it turns out that pedestrian safety is too underdeveloped in this system to really be safe.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#579This 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…
Your comment reminded me of the One Pixel Attack [1] and my joke about wearing a giant yellow square costume...
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#580This 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…
Another quirk of people, particularly acting via "People in Positions of Authority" is that they will need to do something to prevent next time.
Why did this happen? What steps have we make sure it will never happen again? These are both methods of analysing & fixing problems and methods of preserving a decision making authority. Sometimes this degrades into a cynical "something must be done" for the sake of doing, but... it's not all (or even mostly) cynical. It just feels wrong going forward without correction, and we won't tolerate this from our decision makers. EVen if we will, they will assume (out of habit) that we won't
We can't know how this happened. There is nothing to do. ..and.. this will happen again, but at a rate lower than human driver's more less opaque accidents.... I'm not sure how that works as an alternative finding out what went wrong and doing something.
Your comment is easily translated into "you knew there was a glitch in the software, but you let this happen anyway." Something will need to be done.