Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

Post by princeb » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 12:07 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #864

redm wrote: post #831

It's terrible when anyone is killed in an automobile accident. The irony is in the promise of autonomous vehicles to prevent this very thing. I've heard the general report, and I find it interesting that a supervisor was at the wheel, and they, as well as the car, failed to prevent the pedestrian from getting hit. I read they were not in a crosswalk and I'm sure the specific details of the accident matter greatly. It…

It doesn’t matter how good the driver is, AI or human, if you unexpectedly walk right out in front of a car moving at 40mph it’s not going to be able to stop.

Post by astura » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

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.

Post by sah2ed » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

pferde wrote: post #740

gaius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

Something similar, but self-imposed happened when they moved a whole building in Guadalajara: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus#Movement_of... "In order to gain the trust of the employees he asked his wife to enter the building while the movement was taking place."

Post by dkonofalski » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 12:25 AM UTC

woofyman wrote: post #885

more_corn wrote: post #875

Earlier 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.

Post by kaennar » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 11:51 PM UTC

w_t_payne wrote: post #990

kaennar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr. Mary Cummings has been working on talking to NHTSA about implementing V and V for autopilots/AI in unmanned vehicles for a few years now. She's also been compiling a dataset exactly like what you are talking about. I think the idea is to build a "Traincar of Reasonability" to test future autonomous vehicles with. You might want to check out her research https://hal.pratt.duke.edu/research

Thank you for that link. I will pass it along to my former colleagues who I suspect will be very interested in her work.