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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

#761

Post by fudged71 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #666
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? Because at some point, it's literally not possible to test something that's ultimately intended for use on public roads anywhere but public roads. Or, to put it in terms that would be more familiar to developers, "you can test all you want in QA, but prod is the ultimate test of whether your code really works". As mentioned downthread, t…

When it is deemed necessary to test the vehicles on public roads after they have shown to be mostly safe, ALL of these vehicles should have flashing lights like any emergency vehicle.

I'm stunned that when I drive in Texas, there don't seem to be regulations over which vehicles can have flashing lights and with which colors. Yet in these other cities you have experimental robots that are designed to blend in with other cars as much as possible. NO! Make them stick out.

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

#762

Post by NewEntryHN »

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!

The comparison is odd to me. Somehow building bridges seems more of an exact science to me than making cars drive themselves. I sure wouldn't step on a bridge if its engineer doesn't dare going under it. Shit is supposed to stand up.

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

#764

Post by pbhjpbhj »

drstewart wrote: post #721
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.

In the UK, for motorbike tests one does a computer based test, then practices with a company on a private off-road test area. One must pass a test then before being able to practices under instruction on public roads. Once sufficiently practiced one can take the test.

Basically what you propose?

As for comprehensive testing - I think the UK car and motorbike tests are quite good, not comprehensive, but they demonstrate a general ability across a range of skills. Humans can be expected to act relatively consistently (in such things), the test must be more comprehensive when treating a system that you can't expect to have innate consistency.

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

#765

Post by rpmcb »

SilasX wrote: post #711
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? Some phase of testing will necessarily be of public roads. The fact that they started that phase prematurely doesn't somehow mean that "private for profit companies" should never test on public roads. Boeing tests new airplanes in the public airspace too, over public areas.

Boeing certainly tests in public airspace, but only as part of a standardized certification process overseen by the US government - a process and set of regulations that are written in blood.

Uber abides by no such testing standardization.

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

#766

Post by fudged71 »

icc97 wrote: post #713

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary. So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again. Hopefully there's enough data in th…

Although it's comforting that this exact situation shouldn't happen again in an Uber autonomous car... there is no mechanism to share that learning with the other car companies. There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures.

Also my problem with this is that a human death is functionally treated as finding edge cases that are missing a unit test, and progressing the testing rate of the code... and that really bothers me somehow. We need to avoid treating deaths as progress in the pursuit of better things

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

#767

Post by amclennon »

sg0 wrote: post #696

I'm paranoid when I'm on a bike. Any road with a dedicated bike lane may be classified as bike-friendly, but I can't consider it so if cars are on the same road. IMO, the only bike-friendly routes are where there are no cars. I wish pavements could be made wide enough for bikes everywhere, so that bikers could be on the road only for a limited amount of time while crossing intersections.

> Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe

Although I agree with your statement in general, it sounds like she was already walking her bicycle while crossing the intersection, and the fact that she had a bicycle was a moot point.

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

#770

Post by wang_li »

wuliwong wrote: post #736
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?

There shouldn't be any testing on public roads until the executives and engineers are willing to put on blindfolds and spend six hours running back and forth across a track on which a hundred of their autonomous cars are maintaining 60 MPH in both directions.
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