Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

Another point of view is that the state of arizona intentionally hates pedestrians and gratuitously creates roads that put their lives at risk when all they're trying to do is get home from the grocery store or whatever, a perfectly reasonable thing we oughtta all have the right to do without having to walk an extra mile out of our way or whatever.

In NYC, which is actually a reasonable jurisdiction in the USA, that dumb fuck Giuliani tried to enforce anti jay walking laws one time in the '90s. You know what happened? NYPD cops went on the record telling the NY Times they planned to intentionally leave their ticket books in their precinct lockers so they had no way of writing such idiotic tickets. Police nullification, you could call it. Guliani immediately backed down and no one in recent memory has tried to do that again in downstate NYS.

> 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.

Your talking about the "trolley problem" and it is a ethical question as opposed to moral. This is literally a fuckup, bad programing or poor design. We are going to have real ethical concerns because at some point a car is going to have to make a choice pedestrian or occupant - and I know that my elderly father would choose himself if he were in the car, but I might make a different choice.... will the cars ethics ever reflect my own?

> 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 probably right about self-driving cars saving more lives in the long run, but I don't know that the conclusion follows.

It is a tough one, and if there is more loss of life does using a self driving car a bit of fruit off a poison tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf springs to mind when you bring this up.

> From what has been released so far, this feels like a case where a human would have had a high likelihood of doing the same thing

Except the fact that when you look at footage of the road when driven on with a decent camera recording rather than the crapy low quality and very much artificially dark uber footage this looks to have been very avoidable. If the guy who was supposed to be there to take over had been looking up right then, we might not be talking about this at all...

> As someone with a little bit of experience with the machine learning side of things, I understand how this stuff is really hard, and I can imagine a handful of ways the system could have been confused, which makes it all the more important to understand what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening in the future.

Were talking about uber here... it is also just as likely that they are in way over their heads.

> As self-driving cars become more prevalent, things like this will happen and it will be tough to walk the line between over-reacting to every incident and killing progress in this area and designing safe cars that don't make the problem worse.

When I read this bit I felt compelled to respond - the life of one victim is too many. In the early days of aviation people knew the risks... But this wasn't the test pilot who died this was a woman walking down the road. I look forward to the NTSB report - they tend to be the adults in these situations.