There are roughly 3e8 cars in the US, they kill 3e4 people a year => each car kills 1e-4 person
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#592[deleted]
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of frict…
> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to…
Obviously if there's room and time to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, you should, but swerving into an oncoming car? That sounds extreme. There's no way I'd risk killing myself and anyone in the oncoming vehicle to save one person who made a poor decision. In any situation where there's other traffic and off-street foot traffic, swerving might just cause more harm than good. Everything is situational, and I'm sure there are bound to be cases where there is no sensible option for avoiding a fatality because of exceedingly bad timing on the pedestrian's part.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#594> 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).
Here in The Netherlands we use bikes. They're great; so much faster than driving for short distances. It helps that housing is for the vast majority of people within 10-15 mins cycle and the land being flat.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#595Very Relevant video on what the discussions about 'the ethics of self driving cars' miss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcaLnTuidU
Summary: We spend too much time talking about what decision the car should make in these situations, not enough on how allowing a corporation to make those life and death decisions changes our society.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#596There are roughly 3e8 cars in the US, they kill 3e4 people a year => each car kills 1e-4 person a year. If we have say 100 AV right now in US, each car kills 1e-2 person a year. So that's 100 times more dangerous than humans...
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#597I really don't understand the need to put a self driving car around pedestrians or other human drivers. As with any machine learning/control system, wild instabilities can and will crop up. Why don't we simplify the problem domain and keep well suited, designated infrastructure just for self driving vehicles, and solve the last mile problem with a slow 15mph creep to the ultimate destination. I mean, it's impressive that cars can drive themselves through a busy intersection alongside other human drivers, but it is by no means necessary, especially when adding humans into the mix adds a degree of uncertainty that is very difficult to account for...
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#598Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this not supposed to happen with LIDAR equipped cars? My understanding is that a LIDAR provides a completely accurate 3D map of the surrounding area around a self driving car. This is in contrast to Tesla's image recognition approach which makes a 3D map from 2D images. So is seems like a pretty giant bug if a self driving car ever crashes into another object with LIDAR, since it shoul…
You're not wrong, but it is more complicated than that. Lidar gives you an array of 3D points and intensity, corresponding to where the lasers bounced back, and how strong the reflection was. Roughly speaking, from there you have to decide 1) which sets of points belong to the same object, 2) what those objects are, and 3) what those objects intend to do in the future.
So yes, a lidar-equipped AV completely not sensing a pedestrian would be surprising, but you can see how it might have incorrectly classified the pedestrian, or misunderstood the pedestrian's intent.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#599The 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.
Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…
The speed limit for this particular stretch was 45 mph. (sounds high to me, considering there is a bike lane)
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#600> 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.…
Most people don't live in a dense enough city to justify rails.