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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

#731

Post by hkmurakami »

megy wrote: post #722
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…

Car companies have (multiple) private tracks that they stress test their vehicles on. Car companies are extremely risk averse. Public road testing for something safety related is going to be very late stage in development/testing, if at all.

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

#732

Post by nwellinghoff »

I love how everyone is throwing fuel on the fire here with no actual details as to what happened in the accident. It could simply be she ran out into oncoming traffic and got hit. Hard to say a human driver could have performed any better. The devil is in the details.

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

#733

Post by supertrope »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The 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.

Bad idea. Even Uber corporate VPs shouldn't be exposed to unnecessary injury risk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo

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

#734

Post by belorn »

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…

The FLOSS side has argued for openness in critical systems for ages. Medical devices such as pacemakers, air plane systems, automatic breaks on cars, voting machines, and the list just goes on. If the device get hacked or has any bugs then people will likely die (except for the voting machine), but the code is kept private even for those running in devices which literally gets operated into your chest and which a person has to trust with their own life. Governments all over the world seems to be very much against the idea to require that such critical code is made openly for the sake of safety, as that would leak the oh so important trade secrets.

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

#735

Post by zeth___ »

IgorPartola wrote: post #443
orbitur wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular…

I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me. Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won't take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, b…

Largely because of Ralph Nader.

It's amazing how reformers get demonized even after their platform is accepted wholesale by the rest of the world.

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

#736

Post by wuliwong »

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 can't imagine you would want any major new transportation technologies released without being tested on public roads?

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

#737

Post by noir_lord »

megy wrote: post #722
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…

> That is acceptable according to every car driver.

All of them, I mean you took a poll? that must have taken a while.

My understanding (as a non-US resident) is that parts of the US are built around the assumption you drive.

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

#738

Post by grumdan »

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…

Even if we assume that we wanted to address this for real, I fear that it will be next to impossible to actually assess whether whatever mistake caused this has actually been addressed when all the technology behind it is proprietary. I can easily see people being swayed by a well-written PR speech about how "human safety" is their "top priority" without anything substantial actually being done behind the scenes.

I think any attempts to address such issues have to come with far-ranging transparency regulations on companies, possibly including open-sourcing (most of) their code. I don't think regulatory agencies alone would have the right incentives to actually check up on this properly.

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

#739

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

Given the number of fatal pedestrian hits by human drivers, I'd be interested to see how Uber's self driving cars stack up against the apes.

Having said that, one concern one has with self-driving cars is that one can't "reach an understanding" with them the same way pedestrians and drivers regularly negotiate how they're going to behave with each other.

If one doesn't know one is dealing with a self-driving car, one might consider certain situations safe, because they usually would be, but the car negotiates and notices things differently than a human.

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

#740

Post by pferde »

gaius wrote: post #146
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The 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.

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!

Something similar, but self-imposed happened when they moved a whole building in Guadalajara: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus#Movement_of...

"In order to gain the trust of the employees he asked his wife to enter the building while the movement was taking place."

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