941–950 of 1001 posts
Here 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…
Here 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…
On even the slimest cause, plaintiff's council always tries include the manufacturer in the case. Anyone with deep pockets that they can pull in.
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?
In fact, NHTSA statistics includes miles driven under adverse conditions (rain, snow, etc) while I'd bet that this is not the case for Uber.
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…
Hyperbolic rubbish. Like the rest.
Are you saying black boxes are useless to learn from, from a near miss or a crash where no-one dies?
Few lessons are learned from blood in aviation because they are not common.
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…
Or take a slow approach like Google Waymo which was almost perfect so far on the roads. Uber is rushing it, and this could cost whole industry.
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.
Here 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…
>Here we go. We'll now have the first traffic fatality trial where it's not drivers-trying-drivers but people-trying-a-megacorp. On even the slimest cause, plaintiff's council always tries include the manufacturer in the case. Anyone with deep pockets that they can pull in.
Although, as far as I know, were the jury to become aware of this, a mistrial should be declared.
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 crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated" Would be better if the code and data was open for public review.
> Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir said that from viewing videos taken from the vehicle “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."
This seems like an unfortunate accident, but it's not at all clear that the car was at fault or that it could have done anything to prevent it. There was even a human behind the wheel and they didn't react in time either.