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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

#881

Post by goshx »

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…

Thinking about different scenarios as unit tests it shouldn’t be hard for them to simulate all sorts of different scenarios and share those tests. Perhaps that would become part of a new standard for safety measures in addition to crash tests with dummies. In fact, I really think this will become the norm in the near future. It might even be out there already in some form.

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

#882

Post by bigiain »

mindslight wrote: post #839
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…

> 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.

You seriously think Uber wouldn't try to claim "commercial in confidence" or "trade secrets" rights to all the data from every single death?

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

#883

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

Currently, Uber self-driving vehicles are clocking in at a fatality rate of about 50x the rate for human drivers.

You can bring your hypotheticals to bear all you like, but this is a serious problem.

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

#884

Post by cjdaly »

raphaelj wrote: post #832

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...

that doesn't sound like a fair comparison. How many human interventions were there in the 2-3 million Uber miles?

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

#885

Post by woofyman »

more_corn wrote: post #875
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…

Every lesson from aviation is earned in blood. This death wasn't necessary though. The Otto/Uber guys have been informed about their car's difficulty sensing and stopping for pedestrians. I know this because I informed them myself when one almost ran me down in a crosswalk in SF. Can't learn anything from your lessons unless you listen. Maybe they can pause and figure out how to actually listen to their reports of un…

Police are reporting that it never slowed down. Hitting the pedestrian at 40 mph.

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

#886

Post by nealabq »

w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

There may eventually be standard test suites that can be applied to any of the self-driving systems in simulation. This would give us a basis of comparison for safety, but also for speed and efficiency.

As well as some core set of tests that define minimum competence, these tests could include sensor failure, equipment failure (tire blowout, the gas pedal gets stuck, the brakes stop working) and unexpected environmental changes (ice on the road, a swerving bus).

Manufacturers could even let the public develop and run their own test cases.

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

#887

Post by taneq »

daenz wrote: post #778
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…

>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 compa…

Just sensor data to replay the scenario as fully as possible should be sufficient. Whatever it looks like to humans, there's clearly something in there that can be difficult for AI systems and so everyone should be using it as a regression test.

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

#888

Post by adrianmonk »

LifeLiverTransp wrote: post #252
rjvir wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

Very cynical but - if your self-driving is way behind of your competitors- wouldnt it help to have your lousy car in a accident - so that your competitors get hit with over-regulation and you thus kill a market- on which you cant compete?

It's a cynical approach, but they could be playing both angles. Take enough risks that maybe you do succeed and you can cut your costs enormously by actually having SDCs. But if you fail, you also protect yourself by taking the competition down with you.

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

#889

Post by adrianmonk »

rjvir wrote: post #221
w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

Possibly there's enough business risk that if Uber doesn't, someone else will, and then they will have SDCs but Uber won't, and then Uber will go bankrupt just about instantly.

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

#890

Post by goshx »

raphaelj wrote: post #832

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...

That’s not apples to apples. How many cars account for the nhtsa number and how many for Uber’s program?
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