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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

#851

Post by yelloweyes »

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…

Very well put.

It boggles my mind that a forum full of computer programmers can look at autonomous cars and think "this is a good idea".

They are either delusional and think their code is a gift to humanity or they haven't put much thought into it.

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

#852

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ryandrake wrote: post #526
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we wait for the problem to present it and actually cause harm before we throw law enforcement, government regulation, a regulatory body, etc at it?

A pedestrian struck and killed doesn’t count as “harm”?

There's a difference between Uber playing fast and loose and industry wide bad practices.

The latter needs to be addressed by government. The former can be addressed by concerned parties using their political connections to get existing law aggressively enforced.

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

#853

Post by spuz »

annabellish wrote: post #12
_m8fo wrote: post #5

Obviously more information is needed, but I thought the entire point of having a driver behind the wheel is to manually intervene to prevent this very situation? I'm very curious to see how they'll investigate this and who will be determined to be at fault (person behind the wheel or Uber). It will likely set a precedent.

Human beings simply cannot switch between "not focussed" and "in charge of a car, taken out of autonomous mode, and actively avoiding collision" fast enough to avoid most accidents, unfortunately. Neither can humans maintain the focus required to be ready to do that when 99.9% of the time they're not required to do anything. Semi-autonomous cars have drawbacks.

Certainly, humans will never be perfect but there is the wicked problem of how we interact with systems that behave correctly 99% of the time but require human attention the other 1%. There was an excellent Econ Talk podcast about this topic a while ago:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.htm...

However, in my opinion, the driver and by extension his employer Uber must be held responsible in this case. Uber have a license to test their self-driving cars only if there is a human driver in control at all times. Regardless of the crazy things their software decides to do, the human is there as a person of ultimate legal liability.

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

#854

Post by adrianmonk »

emodendroket wrote: post #777
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…

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)

Circumstances basically force them into betting the farm. Whether they want SDCs or not, if someone scoops them on SDCs, it's an existential threat to their business.

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

#855

Post by rboyd »

JimboOmega wrote: post #850
rboyd wrote: post #847

FTA "Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk". The article says "as soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck". The police sergeant also "said he believed Herzberg may have been homeless". These three things may together indicate that even a human driver might have struck and killed the lady if she entered into the roadway unsafely. I'm not sure how everyone (especially on…

Finding any tidbits on what actually did happen has been very difficult. I get that the investigation is of course ongoing, but that's what I want to know - did the tech actually make a mistake here? And a mistake in a broader sense - was it an avoidable accident? If it wasn't this barely feels like news, other than as a milestone. Also... I don't see how her being homeless has anything to do with it.

> Also... I don't see how her being homeless has anything to do with it.

well, higher than average rates of substance abuse in the homeless population. other than that I'm not sure how it could be relevant or why the article mentioned it. we wouldn't know without an autopsy but being drunk could explain walking out into traffic.

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

#856

Post by wetpaws »

jessaustin wrote: post #437
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…

If that's bad, what happens when the robocars get hacked?

What if someone put a bomb in your car or mess with your breaks?

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

#857

Post by castis »

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…

It's morally acceptable to violently end the lives of bystanders if its in the name of progress. Got it.

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

#859

Post by nothrows »

> “The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. As soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck”

Uber has some fucking shitty programmers guaranteed. They murdered this lady. Think about it:

Smart cars basically have 360 degrees of sensors. There’s no way it didn’t detect that lady coming up on the car and the fact that it kills her says to me there was no counter measure. It probably didn’t even slow down until the moment of impact. That's some fucking elementary school shit.

> Chance of Collision? 100%. Maintain Speed

In structural engineering if you designed a bridge poorly and it collapsed killing people you'd lose your ability to practice engineering. The same should be applied.

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

#860

Post by rhizome »

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…

As someone said on Twitter, among software developers, "ethics" is seen as a hobby at best.
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