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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

#671

Post by hackpert »

While incredibly sad, this incident is not terribly surprising because the technology is nowhere near safe enough.

Unfortunately, this will inevitably set the field back by at least 10 years with stricter regulations. We've seen the same with pharma and aviation, where innovation was slowed drastically and is only realistic for big companies. This is especially true here because if self-driving vehicles get banned from public roads, companies like Waymo will be forced to develop bigger private "test tracks" that approximate cities to have any hope of building deployable technology, and they will face the same fundamental limitation – the data will come from an approximation/model and not the actual location with real-life scenarios.

Although there's no doubt that regulations are crucial to prevent such mishaps, I do hope lawmakers can find the right equilibrium on the tradeoff between safety and innovation.

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

#672

Post by kortex »

bobthepanda wrote: post #274
Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. This is why many cities are reducing speed limits. In fact, self-driving cars may actually improve the situation if cars actually start complying with speed limits en masse.

I'm greatly in favor of a slower-moving but more efficient automotive network. How many human inconveniences are caused by what boils down to impatience? See: gridlock, people entering intersections they cannot leave, and jamitons.

(IMHO) jamitons would dissolve if people would leave a flexible buffer between them and the car in front of them and focusing on minimizing braking, rather than driving up to their bumper, brake, wait for moving, accelerate, brake, repeat. The lag due to reaction time and ac/deceleration exacerbates the "viscosity" of traffic flow. If most drivers focused on "staying fluid" rather than hurry-up-and-wait, traffic ought to improve. Like fluidized beds.

https://math.mit.edu/projects/traffic/

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

#673

Post by avip »

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 you ask me which one is coming first, Quantum computing or "better grasp of probability and statistics" among the general public - I take the first with 99% confidence.

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

#674

Post by lsmarigo »

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…

> We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology

Agree, Kumail Nanjiani (comedian) has a great rant on twitter about exactly this, ethical implications of tech-

> As a cast member on a show about tech, our job entails visiting tech companies/conferences etc. We meet ppl eager to show off new tech. Often we'll see tech that is scary. I don't mean weapons etc. I mean altering video, tech that violates privacy, stuff w obv ethical issues. And we'll bring up our concerns to them. We are realizing that ZERO consideration seems to be given to the ethical implications of tech. They don't even have a pat rehearsed answer. They are shocked at being asked. Which means nobody is asking those questions. "We're not making it for that reason but the way ppl choose to use it isn't our fault. Safeguard will develop." But tech is moving so fast. That there is no way humanity or laws can keep up. We don't even know how to deal with open death threats online. Only "Can we do this?" Never "should we do this? We've seen that same blasé attitude in how Twitter or Facebook deal w abuse/fake news. Tech has the capacity to destroy us. We see the negative effect of social media. & no ethical considerations are going into dev of tech.You can't put this stuff back in the box. Once it's out there, it's out there. And there are no guardians. It's terrifying. The end. https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/925828976882282496?lang=e...

It is scary, big tech orgs have no incentive or motivation to even consider ethical implications, whats worse is the American consumer has shown repeatedly that you're OK to do really shady stuff and as long as it means a lower price product/service for the consumer. We're in a kind of dark age of tech regulation and he's right it is terrifying.

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

#675

Post by cbhl »

The last time I visited Phoenix, I recall being shocked at far apart traffic lights were in the city. Between the Wal-marts and the giant four-to-six bedroom homes, it might be normal to see a major street have a mile between traffic lights (and presumably, crosswalks). It was very different from, say, driving in New York, San Francisco or Seattle.

I'd be curious whether "walking outside of the crosswalk" turns out to be material in the analysis by NHTSA/NTSB. Were the crosswalks big enough and close enough that a pedestrian would have normally walked inside one? Was the interchange a regular 90-degree crossing of two roads, or was it something more irregularly shaped? What is the annual rate at which pedestrians get hit at this intersection by human drivers? Do self-driving cars need more examples of "pedestrians walking outside the crosswalk" in their training sets?

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

#676

Post by icc97 »

spyder wrote: post #659
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…

Even worse: There are people who test their DIY self-driving hacks on public roads: https://youtu.be/GzrHNI6eCHo?t=100 Using https://github.com/commaai/openpilot , which is cool but not on public roads.

That is indeed reckless, but that guy is testing open source self-driving technology.

Given that all the main car companies are keeping their technology private I don't see how open-source systems are supposed to keep up without people doing this.

I think you can also contrast this to the many more people who decide to drink alcohol and then drive.

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

#677

Post by debt »

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…

That's why many unnamed companies in the self-driving space are testing solely on enormous closed-off tracks in the South Bay.

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

#680

Post by [deleted] »

dgregd wrote: post #639
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…

My old comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15076613 So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, a bicycle, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broa…

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