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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#51
post #38
post #32

For all of the theoretical moral questions that have been brought up around self driving cars (the proverbial lever that lets you kill one person instead of a handful, for example), it's interesting/inevitable that this one came up first. I'm sure lots of people will argue that self-driving cars will, in the long run, save a lot of lives, and therefore we can justify some loss of life in the process. They are probabl…

Based on what came out of the last few days I don’t think it’s clear at all, I think a human would not have hit the woman. The footage we saw was from a terrible dashcam and did not represent how dark the street actually was. Other people who have driven down the street with cameras show it to be perfectly reasonably lit, with streetlights and everything. Second, the woman was crossing across two lanes, so any driver…

I think both these things are true:

Something was very wrong with how the Uber car handled this.

A human driver might well have avoided hitting the pedestrian, but would not have had any legal trouble if they did.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pedestrian also has a significant contribution of negligence to this collision, IMO.

Why? They crossed a 35 mph (so in Tempe this is a “slow” road) at a corner (unmarked corners are also crosswalks, legally) on a well lit road. Where the car was many seconds away when she started crossing. Would a human driver be deemed at fault in a court of law? Usually not (though in this case, maybe) unless they kept going after the collision, or were under the influence. But that’s because we give human drivers…

As a pedestrian, it's still our responsibility to make sure approaching vehicles are actually stopped before we start crossing. She did not, or she would be alive.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pedestrian also has a significant contribution of negligence to this collision, IMO.

Why? They crossed a 35 mph (so in Tempe this is a “slow” road) at a corner (unmarked corners are also crosswalks, legally) on a well lit road. Where the car was many seconds away when she started crossing. Would a human driver be deemed at fault in a court of law? Usually not (though in this case, maybe) unless they kept going after the collision, or were under the influence. But that’s because we give human drivers…

I don't live there, but this article suggests that there is signage for "no pedestrians" at the location where she was struck: https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/ube...

This twitter stream suggests the same with more details: https://twitter.com/EricPaulDennis/status/975889922413551616...

It appears to me that they did not cross at a corner, and the corners "nearby" in the references above all have marked crosswalks.

If that's the case, I don't see how one could assign 0% negligence to the pedestrian.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that number becomes arbitrary. If it was measured in deaths per lightyear your 'n' would become 0. You know what I meant when I said "n=1".

No, i dont know what you mean. I know only that your comments do not portray a deep understanding of statistics and probability. Do your own homework to determine the liklihood of a low probability event ocurring within a small number of observations. That is you answer to the question of how meaningful it is that Uber experienced a fatality in only 3,000,000 miles.

You're being pompous. I never claimed to have those things.

Re-read my original comment with my edit and you will see why I believe your statistics in fact do not answer the question of how meaningful Uber's fatality is. I doubt your expert testimony of pedantic statistics will trump common sense and the video evidence.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Why in this case is it acceptable to make decisions on non-statistically significant data? You would exercise more rigour than that in a throwaway A/B test.

It is statistically significant, at a 0.03 level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16655081

Excellent

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#56
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the 95 billion or so[0] people that have ever breathed air before the year 1900, all are dead dead.[1] Every year on average, 500 people die of carbon monoxide poisoning[2]. If that rate was steady for the amount of time humans have been alive, that's a total of 25,950,000 deaths ever from carbon monoxide poisoning. "Carbon monoxide exposure kills 1 person every 18 hours (500/8766h). Oxygen has killed 1944 peo…

Come on now, I was asking clearly about data on Uber's death rate...

And I was specifically referring to the absurdity of comparing Uber's death rate to humans'.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, i dont know what you mean. I know only that your comments do not portray a deep understanding of statistics and probability. Do your own homework to determine the liklihood of a low probability event ocurring within a small number of observations. That is you answer to the question of how meaningful it is that Uber experienced a fatality in only 3,000,000 miles.

You're being pompous. I never claimed to have those things. Re-read my original comment with my edit and you will see why I believe your statistics in fact do not answer the question of how meaningful Uber's fatality is. I doubt your expert testimony of pedantic statistics will trump common sense and the video evidence.

It’s ironic, but true that telling someone they’re pompous is almost always in itself, very pompous. In general I find that making a reasoned argument is inevitably more valuable and convincing than calling people names.

Calling names is saying: "you are a pompous person". It is very different to saying "you are being pompous".

And you accused someone else of pedantry!

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#59
post #29

Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interes…

Yes Waymo is still active. I live in the testing zone and see an enormous amount of their vans. About 1 for every 5 minutes of driving.

I wonder if this is because waymo has shown more details of how their lidar operates (and how it would have detected the pedestrian who was hit by the Uber car), but Uber is refusing to show the inner workings of their lidar's abilities to the regulators.

The manufacturer of uber's lidar system recently came out and said that they do not believe it failed, but that the input from it failed somewhere inside Uber's software.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#60
post #45

Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interes…

I think the public will probably feel the same way, but if this happens again with another company, I think there will be sustained backlash. Hopefully Waymo is as advanced as they’re advertising, and given what a terrible company Uber is by comparison, that doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption. You know what they say though, once is a mistake, twice is a habit.

Hopefully Waymo has test drivers that actually pay attention.
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