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One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

spiegel.de

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Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#61

Post by Kaze404 »

efitz wrote: post #19

Serious question: will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? How many autonomous miles without an accident will be sufficient to prove safety? I am not diminishing this tragedy; I can only imagine the grief of the families involved and my heart goes out to them. I am also NOT making the “have to break a few eggs to make an omelette“ argument; clearly something went wrong…

The reason why I'm against self driving cars is simply the fact that they're cars at all. I sincerely have no idea why we are collectively spending so much time and resources to avoid the solution we've had for years: public transportation. I would much rather live in a world where I have to deal with the minor inconvenience that is waiting 20 minutes for a train to arrive but get to my destination cheaply and easily than all the insane beaurocracy and overhead that comes with cars existing at all.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#62

Post by pclmulqdq »

stavros wrote: post #38
manholio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? Not perfection, just no human injuries for the limited duration of the tests, that is, for a few billion km or so.

How many human injuries are there per few billion km when humans are driving? Why isn't that the baseline we compare against?

On highways, the number of human injuries is a lot lower than you think. Most accidents are on surface streets, which is not where most "self-driving" features are purported to be usable.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#63

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #35
j7ake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Autonomous miles without accident” is not the only metric. What matters is also how the algorithm fails. To give an example. If you have autonomous miles without accident that is two times better than humans, but every accident tends to involve dark-skinned children and women, then the algorithm can have better statistical numbers in safety but still be rejected by humans. Safety is a high dimensional problem that c…

So if there's fewer deaths overall, including among black kids, but all the deaths are black kids that's not ok? I get your larger point but this one seems like a really poorly reasoned example.

That's what "equality of outcome" is; it's not about better it's about equality. When equality of outcome is implemented by raising everyone to a better outcome then it's a fine thing but that's not inherent to the underlying concept.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#64

Post by bigDinosaur »

efitz wrote: post #19

Serious question: will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? How many autonomous miles without an accident will be sufficient to prove safety? I am not diminishing this tragedy; I can only imagine the grief of the families involved and my heart goes out to them. I am also NOT making the “have to break a few eggs to make an omelette“ argument; clearly something went wrong…

They need to be significantly safer. Not because humans are a particularly great, but as a human I understand the psychology of other drivers. Faced with another driver I know I can usually predict better what their failure modes are and compensate accordingly. This goes completely out of the window with self driving cars, whether I'm driving and must deal with them or in situations where all the cars are autonomous. And, particularly this is all bad when being a pedestrian.

Truthfully I despise the way this is going. Why can't we just massively reduce car use?

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#65

Post by missingdays »

Kaze404 wrote: post #61
efitz wrote: post #19

Serious question: will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? How many autonomous miles without an accident will be sufficient to prove safety? I am not diminishing this tragedy; I can only imagine the grief of the families involved and my heart goes out to them. I am also NOT making the “have to break a few eggs to make an omelette“ argument; clearly something went wrong…

The reason why I'm against self driving cars is simply the fact that they're cars at all. I sincerely have no idea why we are collectively spending so much time and resources to avoid the solution we've had for years: public transportation. I would much rather live in a world where I have to deal with the minor inconvenience that is waiting 20 minutes for a train to arrive but get to my destination cheaply and easily…

> I would much rather live in a world where I have to deal with the minor inconvenience that is waiting 20 minutes for a train to arrive but get to my destination cheaply and easily

You can already live in such a world

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#66

Post by londons_explore »

efitz wrote: post #19

Serious question: will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? How many autonomous miles without an accident will be sufficient to prove safety? I am not diminishing this tragedy; I can only imagine the grief of the families involved and my heart goes out to them. I am also NOT making the “have to break a few eggs to make an omelette“ argument; clearly something went wrong…

In my mind, I would be happy with 75% of the risk of human driving.

That is enough to be clearly better and clearly safer. It is a big enough margin to prevent lying with statistics ('oh, we only count highway miles', or 'yeah we were including with that statistic the young drink drivers').

It also isn't too unrealistic. If (to simplify things) you imagine that every accident has two cars involved and is the fault of just one of them, then a perfect self driving car that makes no mistakes will still be involved in half as many crashes (ie. 50% of the risk). I therefore don't believe it to be possible to exceed that while most cars are still driven by humans.

I would be completely happy with my government telling car companies they can do whatever they like as long as their accident rate per passenger mile remains under 75% of the nationwide average. I'd be happy with that instead of car standards too - if your manufacturer has a safety record exceeding that, they no longer need to do crash tests, brake performance tests, meet headlight regulations, whatever.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#67

Post by stavros »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #62
stavros wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many human injuries are there per few billion km when humans are driving? Why isn't that the baseline we compare against?

On highways, the number of human injuries is a lot lower than you think. Most accidents are on surface streets, which is not where most "self-driving" features are purported to be usable.

> On highways, the number of human injuries is a lot lower than you think.

Sure, but it's not zero.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#68

Post by mr_toad »

colechristensen wrote: post #57
efitz wrote: post #19

Serious question: will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status? How many autonomous miles without an accident will be sufficient to prove safety? I am not diminishing this tragedy; I can only imagine the grief of the families involved and my heart goes out to them. I am also NOT making the “have to break a few eggs to make an omelette“ argument; clearly something went wrong…

Yes. Robots killing people are much scarier than humans killing people. Unfeeling monsters taking lives are much more frightening because we have zero mental models for what motivates them and therefore no way to predict or protect ourselves from them when we encounter them. Statistics don’t matter. Psychopaths are scarier than normal people even when they have the same outcomes.

We’re just desensitised to motor vehicle accidents. Self driving car accidents are still novel. A million people killed worldwide per year in motor vehicle accidents is just a statistic.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#69

Post by korlja »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #56
Markoff wrote: post #52

One dead and nine seriously injured in accident with test vehicle Four rescue helicopters and 80 firefighters were deployed: in an accident on the B28 in the Reutlingen district, a young man died and several people were seriously injured and taken to hospital. A test vehicle with modern assistance systems was involved in a serious accident with one fatality and nine seriously injured on the B28 in Baden-Württemberg.…

"With Level 2 vehicles, the driver always remains in charge as a matter of principle." I don't speak German (and can't access the article anyway), but that seems like a bad translation.

The translation is accurate. "Bei Level-2-Fahrzeugen bleibt die Fahrerin oder der Fahrer grundsätzlich immer in der Verantwortung." can be translated this way. The only nit I would pick is about the translation of "grundsaetzlich" by "as a matter of principle", it could also be read to mean "generally", "usually", "always" or "basically". In this case, they probably wanted to say "always", but there would also be the legalistic meaning of "grundsaetzlich" which is "normally, but with exceptions".

All in all, no matter the above nits, they are obviously trying to shift blame away from their vehicle.

Re: One dead and nine wounded after accident with self-driving car

#70

Post by ashildr »

lloeki wrote: post #16

> autonom fahrenden E-Testfahrzeug This was a test car (driven by a 43yo) > In einer Kurve kam das Auto aus bislang unklaren Gründen auf die Gegenfahrbahn und streifte dort ein entgegenkommendes Auto For unknown reasons the test car changed lanes in a curve, driving towards (into?) an incoming car. > Die 70 Jahre alte Fahrerin stieß in der Folge mit ihrem Wagen frontal in das Auto eines 32-Jährigen. The aforementione…

> Anmerkung der Redaktion: In einer früheren Version dieses Artikels hieß es, an dem Unfall sei ein autonomes Fahrzeug beteiligt gewesen.

No, the article has been corrected, it wasn’t a test vehicle and (irrelevant, but still wrong) the driver was male.

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