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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

#831

Post by redm »

It's terrible when anyone is killed in an automobile accident. The irony is in the promise of autonomous vehicles to prevent this very thing.

I've heard the general report, and I find it interesting that a supervisor was at the wheel, and they, as well as the car, failed to prevent the pedestrian from getting hit. I read they were not in a crosswalk and I'm sure the specific details of the accident matter greatly. It makes me wonder if a human driver with no autonomous system would have faired any better since someone paid to be alert and a car designed to be alert both failed to prevent the accident.

I'll reserve final judgment until more details are out.

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

#832

Post by raphaelj »

To put this accident in perspective, Uber self-driving cars totaled about 2 to 3 millions miles, while the fatality rate on US roads is approximately 1.18 deaths per 100 millions miles [1].

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...

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

#833

Post by pj_mukh »

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…

Anyone know how this is handled between Boeing and Airbus? Can we mandate the same mechanism between Uber and Waymo?

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

#834

Post by lifeisstillgood »

There are only two paths from here - an escalation of the scramble to real world driving hidden under self-serving rationalisations, ("the bigger picture") or a step back to some industry self-regulation, where self-driving just does not happen till the sensors, the maps and the algorithms are much much much improved.

We know very little about the circumstances here, apart from the obvious tragedy, but given that we learnt from Tesla that you cannot rely on cameras alone, whatever is learnt from this must be shared amoung all the industry and serve as the baseline for future.

I would prefer an outright ban on driverless cars in real world settings (until perhaps each competing car can safely navigate the worst sensor data other companies can offer) but as a minimum we need a neutral clearing house similar to the airline industry.

There are on this forum enough industry insiders, plus a sprinkling of regulators that a global self-regulated path could easily be forged.

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

#835

Post by 0xffff2 »

arnaetra wrote: post #825

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 fiel…

You're not underestimating anything. Rather, the vast majority of developers (much less everyone else) have no familiarity at all with the challenges that self-driving tech has to overcome.

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

#836

Post by jonathanyc »

larkeith wrote: post #829
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…

And it’d be morally unacceptable to allow public deployment of software that has not been sufficiently tested. As other comments have pointed out, self-driving cars have undergone ridiculously little testing. In fact, based on only the objective statistics it is very unlikely that they are anywhere near as good at driving as humans.

There is no reason self-driving cars can’t be tested in private. Companies can hire pedestrians to interact with the cars, and the software can go through the same certification process that buildings and vehicles currently go through.

It’s a false dichotomy to say that you can either have self driving cars or minimally safe and accountable development, but not both.

EDIT: Here is a link to a thread replying to a parent which is now auto-collapsed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620968

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

#837

Post by FlyingSideKick »

Let’s take the extreme example where a bug in a self driving semi truck leads to it mowing down 50 people on a busy sidewalk. How are the victims to get justice? In almost all incidents besides a human truck driver having a major health incident, that driver would go to jail but it seems that there will be little repercussions beyond fines for autonomous driving companies. I think once a mass fatality occurs people will scream for autonomous driving execs and programmers to be held liable.

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

#838

Post by linkregister »

darkstar999 wrote: post #650
lettergram wrote: post #590

Given I've seen (just last year) an Uber self driving car run a red light in SF, nealy hitting several people - this is not at all supprising. I do think Uber should be charged if the car is found at fault. Not a civil case, criminal. We know machine learning algorithms fail all the time (like this). It shouldn't be alright to just ignore this.

> Not a civil case, criminal. Has there ever been a case where a car manufacturer is charged with a crime for a defect that results in a death?

I don’t know about cars, but there is precedent for company officers for being criminally liable for negligent homocide. Even in non-homocide cases, individuals sometimes face criminal charges, as the Volkswagen engineer behind the emissions cheating scandal found out.

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

#839

Post by mindslight »

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…

> We need to avoid treating deaths as progress in the pursuit of better things

Au contraire. Go read building codes some time. There's a saying that they're "written in blood" - every bit, no matter how obvious or arbitrary seeming, was earned through some real-world failure.

The death itself isn't progress, of course. But we owe it to the person to who died to learn from what happened.

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

#840

Post by jeffdavis »

larkeith wrote: post #829
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…

Why are you so sure? Such absolute certainty -- certain enough to dismiss the loss of life for the greater good -- is the cause of so many bad things.

I'd like to believe this technology will save 20000 lives per year. But today is a time for humility and reflection.

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