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Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

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Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#241

Post by shaftway »

noobermin wrote: post #169
vadimberman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember early reports about self-driving experiments saying that some of the issues where because the cars were driving at the speed limit, which is usually not the case in the US with the human drivers. Maybe they decided to change it.

If they just track human driver habits then we're no more safer! What's the point left about self-driving cars then? Free up drivers of even more responsibility when they kill people?

You're reducing the entire benefit of self-driving cars down to whether they follow the speed limit.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#242

Post by hndamien »

jakeogh wrote: post #67
blakesterz wrote: post #13

> “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.” I don't know if that is supposed to make anyone feel better about this, if anything it makes it seem worse. I thought one of the big benefits of these systems was they were supposed to be better at exactly these kinds of situations? More like "autonomous cars a…

Personally, I am constantly scanning for people near the edge of the road and anticipating their movements. I bet most of us have had the experience where someone stepped out unexpectedly but you already took action because you could tell they were not paying attention. Good luck programming that.

I actually think this is a fairly trainable attribute. Given that Tesla does this kind of detection for objects and classification and records many miles of human drivers - it wouldn't be surprising that this may be a learned trait.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#243

Post by brokenmachine »

shkkmo wrote: post #54
brian-armstrong wrote: post #36

So here's one thing about this incident where humans do have a system for this already. People are very good at reading body language. It's possible to gather someone's likely intentions (wrt moving) in a near instant. A defensive driver will see body language that could dart out into the street and slow down, just in case, and give more attention to the person. We are really good at this. I know you can say it was d…

The chief of police says: "“It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,”" I'm curious what you know that he doesn't.

> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,"

How the hell would the chief of police know how to estimate what is possible for an autonomous vehicle to avoid?

Has he even seen that video of the Tesla predicting an accident two cars ahead?

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#244

Post by ryandrake »

helthanatos wrote: post #193
in_cahoots wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s true at all (though I only have my own experience to go off of). I tend to use the speed limit as a point of reference, and then drive a little above it. Prior experience has told me that going the speed limit plus some percentage ‘feels’ safe. If there were no speed limit I’d actually have to pay more attention to the road and surrounding environment to determine what a safe speed is. Right now…

I would like the speed limit on my interstates and highways to go up to 70(they're all straight. 55 is just the only speed limit around here). Driving at 65-70 feels safe in normal conditions. Driving above 70 feels a bit too fast. Speed limits should be more variable depending upon car size and braking power though. I hate having to fear that I might be pulled over for going a bit above the speed limit when there ar…

On most roads around where I live, if you are driving exactly the speed limit, you are a slow moving obstacle that is probably more of a danger due to the extreme speed differential with the other drivers who are 10-20 MPH over the limit. I’d hope self driving cars were programmed to deal safely within the bounds of reality. If there is nobody else on the road, sure drive the speed limit. If cars are whizzing past you on all sides you’re a hazard even if you’re obeying the law.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#245

Post by hnaccy »

isaachier wrote: post #234
r_klancer wrote: post #225

My takeaway from the comments in this thread: self-driving Ubers don't drive defensively, almost surely can't "read" pedestrian behavior, and even with lidar may never have seen Elaine Herzberg. Oh, and they speed. This sounds like straight out of the "hell" scenario for driverless cars: "we cannot accept responsibility for what happens to pedestrians and cyclists foolish enough to stray out of their designated safe…

I think you might be confusing "defensively" with perfectly. There are situations even defensive driving cannot prevent. For example, any car going 35 mph will need a few feet to brake if something jumps directly in front of it. Defensive driving just accounts for one's surroundings and likely outcomes. Seeing as the cars have been on the road in Arizona for a while, and this is the first we are hearing about a pedes…

>Seeing as the cars have been on the road in Arizona for a while, and this is the first we are hearing about a pedestrian collision, it seems the algorithm is pretty safe.

One fatality in 4 million miles is safe? Humans are 20 times better than that.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#246

Post by akira2501 »

thedufer wrote: post #215
akira2501 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are the most dangeorus thing that most people encounter on a daily basis. It's actually yourself, and it's worse when you're at work. Deaths due to vehicles: 36k per year. Deaths due to suicides: 44k per year. Deaths due to accidents: 190k per year. > There are many age and other cohorts of the population for which the leading cause of death is vehicles. This is not true for any cohort. [1] And yes, I'm aware…

> This is not true for any cohort. I think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1] you can find a table on pages 33-34 that contains cause of death by age cohort - the 15-24 group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of. I think part of the confusion from the table you linked to is that it doesn't cont…

> think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1]

You missed the reference.

> group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.

Right, but then you have to ask why? You might find a dataset which further breaks the cohort down into "Male" and "Female" categories; because when you do that, you'll see the data does not line up between the two at all. There will, last time I checked, be about an 8x difference between the two.

This highlights the fact that the driver of the vehicle carries the risk, _not_ some inherent property of the vehicle itself. Ask yourself this question: if we took cars away from young men, would they be any less prodigious when it comes to fatally injuring themselves? History and psychology suggest that they wouldn't fare any better.

> in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.

Suicidal behavior is not a risk factor that you can then translate to vehicles, neither homicide for the reasons I stated above. Finally, when you compare total vehicle fatalities for the cohort to the accidental death category for the same cohort, you realize it's around 30% of the overall deaths. When the 15-24 group injures themselves, it most often _does not_ involve a vehicle.

> a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing

Aircraft bodies are only rated for a certain number of "pressure cycles." There's genuine risk baked right into the airframe.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#247

Post by manfredo »

noobermin wrote: post #209
supergarfield wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free up drivers of even more responsibility when they kill people? That's a strange way to put it. Surely if someone is not driving their car, they can't be responsible if the car kills people (assuming of course the car was well-maintained and the model was legal). I don't see how that's a bad thing, since they have zero control over the situation. Do you mean that it could make car users feel less responsible for…

I'm not sure if you meant it, but you essentially answered my question with a "yes." It's to absolve individuals of responsibility in killing people. If that's the case then I'm not sure how it is a benefit to society.

Responsibility isn't being absolved, it's being shifted to the one that actually operates the vehicle - probably either the car vendor (who either manufactured or licensed the self-driving car software), or the fleet operator depending on what kind of sales and operations model self-driving cars adopt. When human escalator operators were replaced with automatic escalators, was there are problem with shifting responsibility over to Otis and other escalator manufacturers?

As with automatic escalators, there are two primary benefits to society: greater aggregate safety[1], and freeing up people's time. You point to the lack of a human operator to hold responsible as a detriment, but the statistics point the other way around: human drivers are horribly irresponsible and even if we can punish them when they do wrong that doesn't substantially change their behavior. Freeing up people's time is self-explanatory.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#248

Post by oska »

prawn wrote: post #220

Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode. From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The "driver"…

It may have been difficult to avoid the collision but if they were driving at a lower speed the collision may not have been fatal. I do not mean 3mph lower to be within the speed limit. I mean significantly lower if passing in close proximity to a pedestrian who may step out onto the road.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#249

Post by oska »

avs733 wrote: post #224
prawn wrote: post #220

Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode. From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The "driver"…

Apparently my stored links on this topic are dead but two worhtwhile pieces of information on that point 1) drivers who consistently drive below the average speed of other drivers on a road (i.e., who religiously drive the speed limit) are more likely to be involved in crashes 2) More accidents are caused by speed differential than by speed by itself.

Your assertion (true or not) is irrelevant to this case. This was a car impacting a pedestrian, not another car on the road. In any impact between a car and a pedestrian the speed of the car is critical in determining whether the pedestrian will be killed.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#250

Post by __david__ »

blakesterz wrote: post #17
stefan_ wrote: post #10

This is just police standard operating procedure. In any kind of manslaughter where a vehicle is involved, save on paperwork and blame whichever party ended up dead before the driver has even spoken the words "she came from nowhere". Here is the police chief spelling it out for Uber: she came from the shadows I wonder what that LIDAR thinks about the shadows . I mean, this system is in place because everybody drives…

> I wonder what that LIDAR thinks about the shadows. I honestly don't follow these systems very close, but I thought that was one of the big selling points, LIDAR can see into tough situations and things like "the shadows" and help avoid situations where people would fail.

LIDAR indeed doesn't care about ambient light, but it can get confused by certain surfaces. I've seen LIDAR not be able to see a clean black car. The light just got absorbed and there wasn't enough return for it to register.
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