So, who is going to jail (or at least - trial) over this?
Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
901–910 of 1001 posts
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#902Earlier 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…
The idea is to come up with a certification test suite, and the cars have to pass it. Add/modify the tests as experience requires.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#903Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could a human have reacted fast enough to stop for someone jumping out in front of them? If the person jumped out so fast that nobody could have possibly reacted in time, then it's not a stain on the technology- even with an instantaneous application of brakes, a car still takes a while to come to a stop. If the human jumped out ten seconds earlier and was waving her hands for help, then it's an issue. "the whole poi…
I've been saying this from the beginning: it's not enough for self-driving cars to be "better than the average driver". They need to be at least 10x better than the best drivers. I find it crazy that so many people think it is. First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver". Second, just like with "human-like translation" from machines, errors made by machines tend t…
Your first point depends on what question we're asking. Are we asking which is morally justifiable? Or are we asking what the public will accept?
Having seat belts is obviously statistically safer, but when they were first introduced, many people loudly protested that they'd rather be thrown clear in an accident.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#9041500 comments before knowing the real reasons. It could be suicide. The dead woman has history of substance abuse and arrested 6 times.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5519433/Self-driving...
http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#9051500 comments before knowing the real reasons. It could be suicide. The dead woman has history of substance abuse and arrested 6 times. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5519433/Self-driving... http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/
It needn't be suicide; from the second link, the victim may have stepped from a shadowy spot/out of view. A car cannot avoid what it can't see.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#906> “They are going to attempt to try to find who was possibly at fault and how we can better be safe, whether it’s pedestrians or whether it’s the vehicle itself.”
Autonomous vehicles should automatically be 100% liable in every accident in which a person is injured, and it should be paid for by a levy on every vehicle.
A levy is fair because the per vehicle risk is much more uniform than with a driver behind the wheel.
100% liability is fair because the software should be written so that the vehicle predicts the path of all objects within its range and adjusts is speed/trajectory so that there is negligible risk of collision given the worst case behaviour of the object. If an object doesn't show on the car's sensors, then its still the car's fault as the sensors should be built to they do pick up all objects. There is a complete power imbalance otherwise: software cannot be injured in a collision but people can, so all people should be 100% covered to give the software incentive to be the best it can.
Summary: a car is governed by predictable physics, hence there is no such thing as an accident involving an autonomous vehicle, only mistakes.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#907Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's said she's been hit immediately after entering a car lane outside a crosswalk. Quite possibly there was no time for the autopilot to react at all. I hope all video footage for self-driving crashes is mandatorily released.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#908It'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…
Crossing a 4 lane road (where speed limit is at least 40mph) outside crosswalk? It's clear that it is cyclists fault. The only thing that is questionable - would a human driver have avoided this or at least hit the cyclist with lesser speed.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#909Earlier 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…
US lawmakers are very reactionary in the case of gun laws too, it's just that gun owners usually have enough political pull to block them from successfully getting laws passed. (The current campaign for gun control is 100% a reactionary response to whatever's been making the biggest news headlines. For example, the vast majority of US gun homicides are carried out with handguns, yet gun control supporters seem to think it's absurd they're more tightly regulated than AR-15s - which are relatively rarely used to kill anyone and have more mundane uses for things like hunting - just because the AR-15s are in the headlines. The US's most deadly school shooting was done with handguns too.) In fact, I'd argue the reactionary nature of US lawmaking is important to understanding why "sensible", "common-sense" gun control laws are so strongly opposed in the first place.
Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
#910Here we go. We'll now have the first traffic fatality trial where it's not drivers-trying-drivers but people-trying-a-megacorp.
(Disclaimer: I'm a bike advocate, so I may have a different perspective on some of this than most.)
Our car-based transportation system is far and away the most dangerous thing any of us accept doing on a daily basis. 40,000 die a year.
But when cases come to court, everyone on the jury has in the back of their mind "that could have been me if I lost concentration at the wrong moment, or made one bad judgement, etc etc."
So penalties are comparatively light for traffic fatalities. Big punishments are only meted out if the case is so egregious -- repeated drug use, flagrantly reckless behavior -- that the jury can be convinced that the driver is different from them.
In other words, drivers don't get punished for doing something dangerous, because everybody on the road is doing something dangerous. They get punished for doing something more dangerous than the norm.
In this case, there's no question that the "driver" is different than the jury -- it's a computer. Now the symmetry that made jurors compare themselves to the accused is broken.
The result, and what self-driving car advocates don't get, is that self-driving cars don't just have to be safer than human drivers to be free of liability, they need to be safe period. In a trial, they don't benefit from the default "could have been me" defense.
That's a HUGE requirement. In fact, it's probably impossible with our current road system. It won't just take better self-driving cars, but better roads and a major cultural change in our attitudes about driving.
As a bike advocate, I welcome this shift, but I also see how deluded many of the current self-driving projects are. Software moves fast, but asphalt and mentalities move slow. We're not years away from a self-driving transportation system, we're decades.
And this trial is just the beginning of that long story.