Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street • Hacker News Board

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

#821

Post by jarjoura » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life.

You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NOT over-react to a single accident.

From the article it's impossible to know if the cyclist was at fault, so I won't jump to conclusions, but we can't, especially as the creators of the future of autonomous vehicles talk so dissociatively about human life. Either we go out into the public roads with very high certainty that OUR software and OUR hardware won't kill someone, or we wait till we get there.

Public opinion on human driving is doing just fine with human drivers right now, so we can and should take our time to get to the future we want or risk a backlash and a guilty conscious.

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

#822

Post by pinum » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #794

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

> Sure, we can have self-driving cars on specifically designed freeways, but nothing more. But at this point what makes it better than a train?

I'm not necessarily arguing for this, but one viewpoint might be: A vehicle that can autodrive the freeway (i.e. most of the way), and reverts to manual control for the shorter sections before and after the freeway, would have a significant convenience benefit over a train.

Take the train, and you have no vehicle with which to go from the destination station to your endpoint. Also, you could travel at any time instead of being held to the schedule.

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

#823

Post by trhway » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/tem...

"The fleet of self-driving Volvos arrived in Arizona after they were banned from California roads over safety concerns."

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

#824

Post by yelloweyes » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #796

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

Aren't self-driving cars already doing much better than humans on the safety front? That's the standard to beat, not perfection.

1. I seriously doubt self-driving cars will be viable in irregular roads

2. Who do you blame when a faulty algorithm eventually kills a person? Who do you get mad at? When a drunk driver kills your family member, you can go to court and look at their face and look at the faces of their family members. When that happens with a self-driving car you'll just be looking at corporate lawyers who will shrug their shoulders at you and say "lol sorry our dumb machine killed your daughter".

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

#825

Post by arnaetra » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

I have not been following the development of self-driving car tech very closely, but I have some familiarity with the difficulty of the challenges involved and I have a feeling that we are at least two decades away from having fully autonomous tech authorized for use on public roads. Am I underestimating the progress of the tech? I have the impression that there is a tremendous amount of unjustified hype in this field.

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

#826

Post by habosa » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #821

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life. You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NO…

Thank you for adding this perspective. Honestly I am not sure how to rationalize the dueling thoughts in my head.

On one hand, the "just one isn't so bad" argument is rational. In terms of fatalities per mile, self driving cars already seem to be safer than humans as a class. Therefore it would be wrong of me to say that this tech does not belong on the road when I believe I should be allowed to drive.

On the other hand, you said it best. If I ever wrote code running on a machine that killed somebody I don't know how I'd continue in my career. Hell, I work at Google very far from Waymo but if one of our cars struck and killed someone I'd feel some personal responsibility.

So ... I guess it's complicated.

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

#827

Post by smileysteve » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #248

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.

My opinion is that we will come to a point where self-driving cars are demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans. From an ethical standpoint the interesting phase will only start then. It‘s one thing to bring a small fleet of high tech (e.g. having LIDAR) vehicles to the road. It‘s another to bring that technology to a saturated mass market which is primarily cost driven. Yes, I assume self-driv…

> demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans.

I believe the claim is 38 multitudes better than humans, significantly better than marginally.

> accept some increase in traffic fatalities

No. And the question is more about "some" than "some increase"

> accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for tangible time savings?

Texting while driving and even hands free talking were becoming laws in many states before smart phones -- and my experience is that many people readily accept this risk and the legal risk just to communicate faster. The same can be said for the risk of drunk driving -- it's a risk that thousands of Americans take all of the time.

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

#828

Post by zipwitch » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

fudged71 wrote: post #766

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 th…

It makes me uncomfortable too. I think it's because it's a real world trolley problem.

We all make similar decisions all of our lives, but nearly always at some remove. (With rare exceptions in fields like medicine and military operations.) But autonomous vehicles are a very visceral and direct implementation. The difference betweeen the trolley problem and in autonomous vehicles is in time delay and the amount of effort and skill required in execution.

Plus, we're taking what is pretty clearly a moral decision and putting it into a system that doesn't do moral decision-making.

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

#829

Post by larkeith » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #821

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life. You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NO…

> Public opinion on human driving is doing just fine with human drivers right now

There were over 40,000 motor vehicle deaths in 2016 in the US [1] - more than a hundred daily. While loss of human life is always a tragedy, individual fatalities are absolutely worth it if we can begin to reduce that count sooner than by proceeding with excessive caution.

It would be morally unacceptable to delay development merely to avoid a guilty conscience.

[1] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/Fatality-estimates-Jun...

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

#830

Post by 0xffff2 » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

piinbinary wrote: post #776

fudged71 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Although the FAA is of course involved, it's generally the NTSB that is the lead investigator in airplane crashes. The NTSB already has jurisdiction to investigate highway accidents.

There's also NHTSA (which is indeed part of the DoT).

It looks to me like we don't need any new agency at all, just a very small expansion of NHTSA's mandate to specifically address the "self-driving" part of self-driving cars.