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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

#581

Post by jpao79 »

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).

What happens if the 'rail' was actually a specific, demarcated line that autonomous self-driving cars used on specifically selected roads that augmented existing public transportation options? That would alert human drivers/pedestrians/bicyclists to be a bit more careful - similar to the brightly colored green lanes that are starting to be provided for bicyclists.

Similarly for long haul trucking applications - could the far left lane/carpool lane be safely dedicated to autonomous trucks during the hours of midnight-3AM with some bright blinking signs paid for by the autonomous trucking industry trade group?

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

#582

Post by dfee »

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 couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I then realized why your comment doesn’t make any sense - you’re effectively arguing “if I could master-plan society and the economy for a while, this is how I’d decree it to be.”

Maybe some people don’t want to live in dense urban areas, maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail, maybe they want privacy. But looking out the window, I can say American society has soundly rejected the rail as the ultimate solution.

Short of understanding your perspective as a longing personal desire for trains, your conclusion is so far removed from reality that it’s nonsense.

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

#583

Post by gleenn »

neaden wrote: post #231
rjvir wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess my hopeful answer would be they start getting treated like Enron and someone high up goes to prison until they start to comply.

Did anyone actually go to prison from Enron?

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

#584

Post by jsjohnst »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #554
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 unpr…

We can’t even standardize on a format across browsers without severe inconsistencies and bugs, yet you expect vehicles of all types and pedestrians to cooperate in a network? That’s not even taking into account the outliers who refuse to conform (or worse, those who try to hack it).

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

#585

Post by vamin »

maxyme wrote: post #389

If you're familiar with that part of ASU campus you honestly could have seen this coming. There are a few different self driving cars in Tempe (Waymo, Uber, GM...) and Uber drives by far the most aggressive. They drive on a pedestrian heavy road and drive faster than most of traffic. They accelerate rapidly when a light changes and can brake hard. There are always tons of pedestrians in the area and it isn't uncommon…

I wonder if it's because Uber algorithms are trained using Uber driver data (taxi drivers tend to be very aggressive drivers).

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

#586

Post by abhirag »

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…

You are seeing the Trolley Problem Dilemma[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem] in action. Majority of respondents when asked that problem would choose to let a few people die to save a larger number of people. Emphasis being on "let a few people die" and not "kill a few people", machines (i.e. lever in that problem and autonomous car in this scenario) somehow evoke a more logical and less emotional response, I guess machines create an emotional distance between the people who would die and the respondent. If the same respondents would somehow feel more responsible for the death, i.e. the machine is removed from the scenario the response would be much different.

Not implying that the lack of empathy is in anyway acceptable, but people should know that when machines are involved in such scenarios it is much easier for them to distance themselves emotionally, this is not new, weapons are a prime example of this. Maybe by knowing this dilemma people can react better to such tragedies.

I hope people show more empathy knowing this.

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

#587

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]

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

#588

Post by lisper »

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 just really build rails.

How will that help? The reason that the trains in London and Singapore don't kill people is not that they are on rails, it's because they're underground.

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

#589

Post by ptr_void »

My non-expert opinion is that we will not see self driving cars become reality in our lifetime. I don't understand why anyone believes training on some videos/pictures to calculate some probabilities would ever be enough to handle all the complexities of the real world.

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

#590

Post by lettergram »

Given I've seen (just last year) an Uber self driving car run a red light in SF, nealy hitting several people - this is not at all supprising.

I do think Uber should be charged if the car is found at fault. Not a civil case, criminal. We know machine learning algorithms fail all the time (like this). It shouldn't be alright to just ignore this.

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