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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#151

Post by lainga »

peterwwillis wrote: post #52

Situations no self-driving car can avoid: - philosophical dilemma - physics-constrained reaction times - actions that violate the rules of the system Solutions: - protected car lanes - protected bike lanes - protected pedestrian lanes Reasons why these solutions are not put in place: - cost Until humans determine that the cost of human life is higher than the cost of upgrading infrastructure, we should accept human d…

If by "protected passenger lane" you mean putting a Jersey barrier between the sidewalk and the road, no thanks. Maybe I'm a spoiled suburbanite, but I can't help but recall that, scant a century ago, pedestrians could walk along or on the streets wherever they pleased.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#152

Post by wtetzner »

Alex3917 wrote: post #106
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Why? It’s not a problem if Uber kills pedestrians, even in situations where it’s completely avoidable. It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so.

> It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so.

I doubt that's true, but even if it were, I believe the rules of the road are "always yield to pedestrians, even if you have the right-of-way".

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#153

Post by guelo »

jonlucc wrote: post #68
leggomylibro wrote: post #9

FTA: "The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. ... Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel." That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when some…

I agree completely. One thing that is important to me is that the whole self-driving field will learn from every mistake. In other words, every self-driving car should only make the same mistake once, whereas with humans, each human has to learn only from their own mistakes.

Uber's algorithms might learn from this. None of the other self driving car companies will.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#154

Post by keymone »

JackFr wrote: post #67
nodesocket wrote: post #8

Striking a pedestrian in a crosswalk is horrible and terrible news. The reality though is how many pedestrians are hit by manual driver's vs automous drivers? On a percentage basis I gotta believe autonomous cars are orders of magnitude safer. Self driving cars aren't going to be perfect. How many people lost their lives in early factories to machines during the industral revolution? Imagine if they had pulled the pl…

> On a percentage basis I gotta believe autonomous cars are orders of magnitude safer. Why? NHTSA reports 1.15 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles travelled in 2015. Waymo advertises >5 million road miles travelled. Let's say Waymo + Uber have driven 10 million vehicle miles and killed 1 person. That makes them 10 times more dangerous than human driven cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_r…

what about tesla though? by november 2016 they've accumulated 1.3 billion self droven miles [1]. autopilot was released in september 2014, so that's 2 years, or 600 million miles per year. and that was ramping up during those years, so i think it's safe to assume at least 1 billion miles / year these days.

2 deaths in over 2 billion miles is roughly 10 times safer than human drivers.

[1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#155

Post by AYBABTME »

jaxbot wrote: post #45
itamarst wrote: post #16

The video says bicyclist and shows a bent bicycle. So pedestrian or bicyclist?

It would explain the "outside a crosswalk" remark better if the person were riding the bike. This is one of those cases where video evidence should be subpoenaed, though. It's far too common for the police to accept the statement from the only party still alive, and come up with incorrect conclusions about what happened on the street.

Seems very unlikely to me that this case will be brushed off without police looking at video.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#156

Post by sunsunsunsun »

conductr wrote: post #87
timmaah wrote: post #32

The video mentions she was on a bike and shows a mangled bicycle. Also the line markings on the street indicate there is a bike lane to the left of a right turn lane. Definitely very bad. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4369934,-111.9429875,3a,75y,...

Not to be insensitive to the death. But, that bike lane design is just horrible. Are human drivers really known for respecting the "do not cross solid white line" rules? 9/10 drivers that realize at the last moment they need to turn right are going to quickly cross over this bike lane probably without much time to check their blind spot. If I was cycling on this path, I'd want to use the sidewalk and be extra cautiou…

I have been hit by a car in a bike lane by a car making a rogue left turn (In the UK). I'm always wary of riding in bike lanes like this now.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#157

Post by swyx »

I'm saddened by this incident but have thought a lot about this eventuality. there are a few levels of societal acceptance of self driving car death outcomes i can think of:

A - Human equivalent: self driving car obeys reasonable rules that a human also would eg minimum speed on a highway and kills someone

B - Trolley problem: (very artificial scenario) self driving car has to choose between killing N or M people where N > M and wrongly (in hindsight) chooses N

C - Car fault: self driving car kills someone in a situation where no human would have

As a society we would probably accept A easily but B starts to get shaky. C currently looks completely unacceptable, BUT I would argue that society has to get to a point where even C is ok conditional on the probable result that overall car deaths decline dramatically.

In other words we will have to get to a point where individual deaths are extremely regrettable but the overall death reduction of adopting self driving cars are so undeniable that the individual deaths can be discussed without also talking about banning SDCs in the same breath.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#158

Post by vasilipupkin »

kerkeslager wrote: post #112
leggomylibro wrote: post #9

FTA: "The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. ... Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel." That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when some…

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as someone walking out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads. That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident. There were 34,439 fatal motor vehicle crashes in t…

you have to take into account miles driven. Yes, we have 37K fatalities, but trillions of miles driven. So, it comes out something like 1.2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven for human drivers. Which means, so far, self driving cars have a worse record per 100 million miles driven. So far.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#159

Post by jws »

odammit wrote: post #41

Curious how the numbers work out of number of miles [1] to number of deaths of autonomous vs standard vehicles. I know the scale is different but since this is the first death I’m curious if the percents fall in line. [1] is distance the right metric?

This is an interesting metric. Although self driving test cars are rare, the whole point of their existence is to drive so they probably clock more hours than a normal car.

About 5400 pedestrians are killed each year in the US. US drivers go 3.1 trillion miles a year. So they kill a pedestrian about every 5.7 billion miles. Last November, Waymo said they had 4 million self driven miles, so well short of statistically expecting to hit a pedestrian. In September of some unspecified year Axios claims Uber had self driven over 1 million miles.

My estimate needs help, the distribution of pedestrian bearing roads and pedestrian free roads likely does not match from my total miles per year number and what carbot testers cover. Also, this may have been a cyclist death, which adds another 800 or so deaths per year.

But, in any event, in rough numbers, Uber appears to have beat their expected time to pedestrian fatality by two or three orders of magnitude.

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