Did the person riding along attempt to take control? I wonder if they will get held responsible..
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#772This 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…
Interesting insight. While self-driving cars should reduce the number of accidents, there are going to be some subset of people who are excellent drivers for which self-driving cars will increase their accident rates (for example, the kind of person who stays home when its icy, but decides that their new self-driving car can cope with the conditions).
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#773The 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.
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…
But is that the actual situation we're talking about? Or are we actually talking about a situation where the person may have been jaywalking but would have had a reasonable expectation that a human driver would stop? I walk a decent distance to work every day and I don't think anyone totally adheres to the lights and crosswalks (not least because if you do you will be running into the road just as everyone races to make a right turn into the same crosswalk you're in).
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#774Former 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…
Perhaps companies need to test their safety devices first. I.e., first prove that their LiDAR correctly identifies pedestrians, cyclists, etc. From there, build test-vehicles with redundancy, e.g. with multiple LiDAR devices. Then prove that the vehicles actually stop in case of emergency. And only then actually hit the road. Of course, the US department of transportation should have set up proper certification for a…
>the US department of transportation should have set up proper certification for all of this
I think you're severely underestimating the path that something like this would have to take. The certification itself would be under so much scrutiny and oversight that it would take years for that to get done. Unfortunately, the technology is far more readily available and easy to get working than the political capital required to create a certification for this.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#775If you're familiar with that part of ASU campus you honestly could have seen this coming. There are a few different self driving cars in Tempe (Waymo, Uber, GM...) and Uber drives by far the most aggressive. They drive on a pedestrian heavy road and drive faster than most of traffic. They accelerate rapidly when a light changes and can brake hard. There are always tons of pedestrians in the area and it isn't uncommon…
This matches my experience driving elsewhere. You need to adapt to the context, the car should not drive the same way everywhere.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#776One 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 th…
That raises an interesting question: Should there be the equivalent of the FAA for self-driving cars? (Perhaps this could be a function of DoT.)
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#777One 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 th…
Well, for one thing, I think I have misgivings in part because Uber hasn't really demonstrated an attitude that makes me think they'll be very careful to reduce accidents. (Also, the extent to which they've bet the farm on autonomous driving presents a lot of temptation to cut corners)
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#778One 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 th…
>There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures.
This implies they're using the same systems and underlying models. If one model hit a pedestrian because of a weakness in training data plus a sub-optimal model hyperparameter, and therefore was classified a pedestrian in that specific pose as some trash on the street, how do you share that conclusion with other companies models?
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#779In the early 20th century the automobile industry mobilized to downplay the deadly threat automobiles posed to pedestrians, and lobbied to create new laws to frame pedestrians as being at fault instead of car drivers (eg. jaywalking). I expect we'll soon see tech companies do the same in order to favour their autonomous automobile businesses at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists.
This. There are many posts on this thread suggesting we could fix all this by lowering speed limits, etc. That's been known for a hundred years at this point. If you want to get up on the history you can grab a copy of "Fighting Traffic," by Peter Norton. He goes through all the efforts cities made in the 1920's to limit cars, and how the motor lobby formed in opposition to this and little by little reversed the tabl…
Or shorter version https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Ri... or podcast version https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...
Indeed it has been known for a long time. This is an opportunity to reverse bad decisions made a century ago, regardless of how quickly self-driving cars actually are adopted.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#780Uber is responsible for this, and corporations are people, right? That reminds me I have an episode of opening arguments to listen to on the subject.