891–900 of 1001 posts
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...
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…
FTA: "The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. ... Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel." That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when some…
The main problem with self-driving cars is that they can't "read" humans' body language. A human driver can see pedestrians and cyclists (and other cars) and have a rough idea of what they're likely to do in the next few seconds, i.e. the pedestrian leaning out on the crosswalk curb is likely to step into the road soon. Even a reaction time of milliseconds can't make up for the (currently exclusive) human ability to…
Even on crosswalks. If I just strolled out on a crosswalk without looking, and waiting for drivers who were paying no attention, I’d be long dead.
This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…
Though that would of course depend on how insurance even looks for SDCs. Maybe big companies like Uber will self-insure.
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...
Considering that humans would likely slow down if they see a pedestrian - even if one appeared suddenly - this is even more disconcerting.
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…
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…
I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me. Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won't take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, b…
They're still very reactionary in that, which is precisely why it isn't very effective when a subset of them do react: there are plenty of smart things that could get proposed, but the overlap between people who know what they're talking about and people that want the laws is exceptionally small, so consequently dumb, ineffective stuff that has no chance of passing anyway gets proposed. What does get proposed is a knee-jerk reaction to what just happened, and rarely actually looks systemically at the current laws and gun violence as a whole. Example: the Las Vegas shooting prompted a lot of talk of bump stock bans. Bump stocks are so rarely used at all, nevermind in violence, and they will generally ruin guns that weren't originally made to be fully-automatic very quickly if they're actually used for sustained automatic fire. Silly point to focus on suddenly. After the Florida shooting last month so much focused on why rifles are easier to obtain than handguns. And it's because overwhemingly most gun violence is handguns. Easily concealable rifles are already heavily regulated at the federal level for that very reason.
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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.
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…
Take a look at the cost of airplanes, even small ones.
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Totally agree on your premise that we can rationalize humans killing humans - but we cannot do so with machines killing humans. If self-driving cars really are safer in the long-run for drivers and pedestrians - maybe what people need is a better grasp on probability and statistics? And self-driving car companies need to show and publicize the data that backs this claim up to win the trust of the population.
If a human kills a human, we have someone in the direct chain of command that we can punish. If an algorithm kills a person... who do we punish? How do we punish them in a severe enough way to encourage making things better? Perhaps, similar to airline crashes, we should expect Uber to pay out to the family, plus a penalty fine. 1m per death? 2? What price to we put on a life?
This is a tough problem, but if we stop or limit the allocation of resources to protect the secretive intellectual property that is autonomoilusly running people over, that is the most effective incentive I can see. Plus it's pretty easy to do.
We don't even have to force them to disclose anything, by affording less legal protection, their employees will open-source it for us.