181–190 of 445 posts
> This puts the fault squarely on Uber’s doorstep, though there was never much reason to think it belonged anywhere else. Are you kidding me? At least 80% of the comments I saw online the following week were blaming the woman. It seems to me like Uber's self-driving system is absolute trash. But they were in a hurry to "go live" with it, because they need it so that the company can become profitable ASAP. And thanks…
> This puts the fault squarely on Uber’s doorstep, though there was never much reason to think it belonged anywhere else. Are you kidding me? At least 80% of the comments I saw online the following week were blaming the woman. It seems to me like Uber's self-driving system is absolute trash. But they were in a hurry to "go live" with it, because they need it so that the company can become profitable ASAP. And thanks…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point isn't that speed limits need to change, it's that it is incumbent upon the driver to slow down if environmental conditions prevent them from traveling safely at the speed limit.
What is that supposed to mean? You can't have 100% safety at any speed. If it really is incumbent upon the driver to always drive at night in such a way that no collision can occur at all, then why not change the speed limit? My whole point is that it's not the driver's responsibility to account for every possible scenario. It can't be.
Nobody said anything about 100% safety in some provable way. But certainly it is very much the driver's responsibility to pick a safe speed. Driver's Ed (at least in most? EU countries) teaches that the posted speed limit is just that, the maximum legally allowed speed. As a driver you -- and nobody else -- are responsible for picking a safe speed depending on the environmental conditions.
In particular, the following are explicitly taught in Driver's Ed: 1) Don't overdrive your visibility (headlights, curve)... you must be able to look sufficiently far ahead such that you can stop in the event of an obstacle appearing. (In case of two-directional traffic in the same lane, you must be able to stop in half your visible distance.) 2) Reduce speed according to weather: Rain (aqua-planing), Snow/Ice (slippery), Fog (reduced visibility as in 1) 3) You must be aware of situational dangers and be ready to stop if necessary (e.g. parked cars on the side of the road between which children could emerge...)
Nobody else will tell you what the maximum safe speed at any given moment is. You're supposed to learn how to handle your vehicle during driver's ed, and then act accordingly.
Overdriving your visibility is just plain stupid -- you simply will not be able to avoid a collision with an object in time; you're basically driving blind and hoping for the best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> get 5 9s reliability That's it? Humans have greater than 7 9's reliability when driving. (As measured by fatalities per time of driving, and assuming a fatality takes 5 minutes, and average speed is 30mph.) If the cause of a fatality is 10 seconds of failure, not 5 minutes, humans have greater than 9 9s of reliability. Math: 10 seconds / (1.13 / (30 miles/hour / 100 million miles)) Fatality rate is 1.13 per 100 mil…
I agree with the basic point, but does the 1.13 per 100 million miles figure include freeway driving?
The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...
I think the disturbing thing to me is that there wasn't any sort of layered reliability approach to the testing process itself. When you know you're going to be testing changes to a very complex, multi-sensor real-world system, it would be a standard approach to lay in a more foundational set of technology and practices to the system tests to serve as a conservative safety net. For example, an overriding set of heuri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.
In Poland there's an unwritten custom of saying thanks by flashing emergency stop lights for two ticks. The most common use case is when someone lets you through when they don't have to. On freeways the same is used by cars coming from the opposite direction if there's a radar ahead. Still, in peak hours pretty much everyone is a dick, even usually chill Uber drivers. Edit: it's also used as a "sorry" signal too. Als…
It seems like it was actually Uber who disabled the safety settings that were there to prevent this according to Volvo. "Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle’s radar and camera." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...
This whole line of reasoning frustrates me somewhat. The story of "Uber Disabled the Safety System" paints Uber out to be negligent for doing so. Outside of consideration of all the other facts (which unlike this one, do indeed suggest that Uber are to blame), this element of the story is not indicative of negligence. Of course they disabled the existing safety system - they were aiming to build a new, safer one that…
You can't just call something a safety system. You have to prove that it is a safety system by testing it, which is something that Uber hadn't done before they disabled the existing system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No municipality in the country should allow Uber to test on their streets after they killed someone This is pitchfork mentality. Many industries have to deal with unintentional deaths. Car manufacturers sometimes have to deal with deaths resulting from hardware failure. Food companies sometimes have to deal with recalls due to food poisoning deaths. If the response to a death is to ban all further production work,…
Or a cynic could interpret that as "we've hired a crony of the people who will be judging us so he can lobby them to let us off easy".
At the end of the day, the NTSB isn't in the game of shutting down companies. NTSB would much rather see that self-driving vehicle development is happening safely since the matter of the fact is that it _is_ happening, despite all of its imperfections.
I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…
Your examples are absurd. Would you program a car to assume that all New Yorkers won't Jay walk? How about all people in Tempe will rush into the streets? Cultural context definetly matters, but for none of the reasons you've mentioned. Writing specific use cases is insane for more reasons than I should have to point out to you. What if someone from tempe is on vacation in NY, should they be in danger because they fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highwa…
Or when there's a random tire or mattress lying in your lane. I see that kind of stuff on the interstates all the time.
If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.