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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

#721

Post by drstewart »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #682

Had the car passed the driving test? There should probably be a specific, complex and comprehensive test for autonomous vehicles. Also I'd want to see shared liability, the company are driving it (by proxy through their software) so they should be liable to some extent.

>There should probably be a specific, complex and comprehensive test for autonomous vehicles

Maybe we should start with a specific, complex and comprehensive test for human drivers first.

And to build on the sentiment of this thread, every driver should finance their own test course to practice on before "subsidizing" their learning on public roads.

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

#722

Post by megy »

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…

> Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads?

I mean, this is the way cars have always operated. It is somehow any different to let them "test" there brake system, there acceleration systems? Car companies have always been able to do whatever they want, who cares about the deaths.

For some reason, when it comes to roads, we all just accept a certain amount of deaths each year. Over a million people are killed every year around the world, up to 40,000 in the US alone. That is acceptable according to every car driver.

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

#723

Post by dmreedy »

icc97 wrote: post #704
coldtea wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars Why? This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven (only BS stats, under ideal conditions, no rain, no snow, selected roads, etc -- and those as reported by the companies itself). I can very well imagine a greater than average human driving AI. But I can also imagine being able to write it…

If self-driving cars 1. don't read texts whilst driving, 2. don't drink alcohol, 3. stick to the speed limit, 4. keep a 3-4s distance to the car in front, 5. don't drive whilst tired 6. don't jump stop signs / red lights it will solve a majority of crashes and deaths. [0] The solutions to not killing people whilst driving aren't rocket science but too many humans seem to be incapable of respecting the rules. [0]: htt…

You missed a rather important point 0:

If self-driving cars are, at their best, roughly as capable as a human driver.

This is a big 'if'.

The solution to not killing people is a kind of rocket science. In fact, it's probably harder than rocket science[0]. It's predicated on a lot of things that are very, very, very hard. The fact is that humans, who are already pretty capable of most of these very very hard things, often choose to reduce their own capabilities.

If the best self-driving tech is no better than a drunk human, however, then we haven't gained much.

---

[0] though perhaps not harder than brain surgery.

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

#724

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

naasking wrote: post #701
coldtea wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars Why? This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven (only BS stats, under ideal conditions, no rain, no snow, selected roads, etc -- and those as reported by the companies itself). I can very well imagine a greater than average human driving AI. But I can also imagine being able to write it…

> This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven Because machines have orders of magnitude fewer failure modes than humans, but with greater efficiency. It's why so much human labour has been automated. There's little reason to think driving will be any different. You can insist all you like that the existing evidence is under "ideal conditions", but a) that's how humans pass…

Your comment is just random hopeful assertions though...

>It's why so much human labour has been automated.

But how much human labour that is as complicated as driving has been automated? As far as I can tell automation is very, very bad when it needs to interact with humans who may behave unexpectedly.

>b) we've gone from self-driving vehicles being a gleam in someone's eye to actual self-driving vehicles on public roads in less than 10 years. Inclement weather won't take another 10 years.

>It's like you're completely ignoring the clear evidence of rapid advancement just because you think it's a hard problem, while the experts actually building these systems expect fully automated transportation fleets within 15 years.

Actually plenty of experts within the field disagree with you.

“I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students,” he says. “Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation.”

Steve Shladover, transportation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley

http://www.automobilemag.com/news/the-hurdles-facing-autonom...

With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it's not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved.

Herman Herman, Director of the National Robotics Engineering Center @ CMU

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7y49y/robotics-l...

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

#726

Post by EADGBE »

arkh wrote: post #716
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…

I'm for a middle-of-the-road way of doing things at first: make some highway lanes for autonomous cars only. Separate those lane physically. Remove the speed limit there to encourage people to get cars which can use those lanes. Implement a way for the highway operator to affect the cars on it: make way for emergency vehicles, adapt to infos the operator can aggregate and transmit, change the speed of cars to the slo…

> make some highway lanes for autonomous cars only. Separate those lane physically

sure, makes sense to me.

But God, that would cost a fortune.

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

#727

Post by draw_down »

coldtea wrote: post #662
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…

> So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars Why? This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven (only BS stats, under ideal conditions, no rain, no snow, selected roads, etc -- and those as reported by the companies itself). I can very well imagine a greater than average human driving AI. But I can also imagine being able to write it…

Because humans are shit drivers. That is why. I don't say this because I'm in love with the idea of self-driving cars or whatever. I say this because humans are really truly shit drivers.

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

#729

Post by mejari »

icc97 wrote: post #704
coldtea wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars Why? This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven (only BS stats, under ideal conditions, no rain, no snow, selected roads, etc -- and those as reported by the companies itself). I can very well imagine a greater than average human driving AI. But I can also imagine being able to write it…

If self-driving cars 1. don't read texts whilst driving, 2. don't drink alcohol, 3. stick to the speed limit, 4. keep a 3-4s distance to the car in front, 5. don't drive whilst tired 6. don't jump stop signs / red lights it will solve a majority of crashes and deaths. [0] The solutions to not killing people whilst driving aren't rocket science but too many humans seem to be incapable of respecting the rules. [0]: htt…

But it doesn't work like that. You can't just say "If they don't do X Y or Z", because while they may not do X Y or Z, that doesn't mean they won't do A B or C that are equally bad or worse. Human and self-driving are two completely separate categories, you can't just assume that things one does well the other also does well, and so just subtract the negatives. You could easily flip your comment to go the other way: "If human drivers don't mistake trucks for clouds or take sharp 90o turns for no reasons then they're safer".

I do think that self-driving cars will be safer, but it's upon it's proponents to prove that.

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

#730

Post by smogcutter »

arkh wrote: post #716
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…

I'm for a middle-of-the-road way of doing things at first: make some highway lanes for autonomous cars only. Separate those lane physically. Remove the speed limit there to encourage people to get cars which can use those lanes. Implement a way for the highway operator to affect the cars on it: make way for emergency vehicles, adapt to infos the operator can aggregate and transmit, change the speed of cars to the slo…

GM's "super cruise" fills the exact role you're describing aside from removing the speed limit, and aside from the billions of dollars in public infrastructure spending and increased traffic for everyone else.
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