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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

#621

Post by TraffigDoge »

lisper wrote: post #588
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.

Jawohl! Our Straßenbahnen kill people all the time, because they take part in regular traffic. If you walk in front of one, it can't steer away!

You need to put the trains below ground, or well above!

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

#623

Post by gt_ »

dfee wrote: post #582
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 rej…

>But looking out the window, I can say American society has soundly rejected the rail as the ultimate solution.

“Soundly”? If you mean in the way a child “soundly” rejects vegetables, maybe. But, the American public has never had this conversation. Capitalism and it’s ensuing cultural affects had it for them.

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

#624

Post by nkrisc »

golergka wrote: post #192
gaius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

Would they do it enough times for such observation to have any statistical significance?

Likely they were not familiar with the scientific method and statistics as we know it today.

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

#625

Post by schintan »

I think the test cars should be covered in layers upon layers of foam or another kind of shock absorbing material. This should reduce the collision impact at least a little and can be the difference between someone getting killed and escaping with injuries in some cases.

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

#626

Post by john_teller02 »

dfee wrote: post #582
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 rej…

You are stupid and what you say is utterly nonsense. You don't speak for me or every Tom Ahmed Asok Yun in USA. So F off.

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

#627

Post by danso »

ingsoc79 wrote: post #251
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…

The main problem with self-driving cars is that they can't "read" humans' body language. A human driver can see pedestrians and cyclists (and other cars) and have a rough idea of what they're likely to do in the next few seconds, i.e. the pedestrian leaning out on the crosswalk curb is likely to step into the road soon. Even a reaction time of milliseconds can't make up for the (currently exclusive) human ability to…

OT, but I would love to see how self-driving AIs handle something like Vietnam moped traffic and pedestrian crossings. The standard behavior for pedestrians is to walk slowly and keep walking -- stopping, even if it seems necessary to avoid a speeding driver, can be very dangerous, as generally, all of the street traffic is expecting you to go on your continuous path. It's less about reading body language than expectation of the status quo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKPbl3tRf_U

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

#628

Post by IgorPartola »

cle wrote: post #502
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.…

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.

Right. Which is why tech companies are the wrong people to solve transportation. When you only own a hammer, everything is a nail.

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

#629

Post by jakobegger »

dalbasal wrote: post #580
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…

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, b…

It‘s amazing how quickly things can happen after an accident.

In a nearby town, people have petitioned for a speed limit for a long time. Nothing happened until a 6 year old boy was killed. Within a few weeks a speed limit was in place.

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

#630

Post by falcolas »

anonu wrote: post #605
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…

Totally agree on your premise that we can rationalize humans killing humans - but we cannot do so with machines killing humans. If self-driving cars really are safer in the long-run for drivers and pedestrians - maybe what people need is a better grasp on probability and statistics? And self-driving car companies need to show and publicize the data that backs this claim up to win the trust of the population.

If a human kills a human, we have someone in the direct chain of command that we can punish. If an algorithm kills a person... who do we punish? How do we punish them in a severe enough way to encourage making things better?

Perhaps, similar to airline crashes, we should expect Uber to pay out to the family, plus a penalty fine. 1m per death? 2? What price to we put on a life?

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