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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

#331

Post by statr123 »

mtgx wrote: post #293
olympus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a human have reacted fast enough to stop for someone jumping out in front of them? If the person jumped out so fast that nobody could have possibly reacted in time, then it's not a stain on the technology- even with an instantaneous application of brakes, a car still takes a while to come to a stop. If the human jumped out ten seconds earlier and was waving her hands for help, then it's an issue. "the whole poi…

I've been saying this from the beginning: it's not enough for self-driving cars to be "better than the average driver". They need to be at least 10x better than the best drivers. I find it crazy that so many people think it is. First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver". Second, just like with "human-like translation" from machines, errors made by machines tend t…

Median*

Average means something else, technically.

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

#332

Post by duxup »

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…

It's an interesting dynamic. We want this tech to be much better than us terrible humans before we deploy it and anything like us terrible humans is not acceptable.

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

#333

Post by dang »

__abc wrote: post #286
dang wrote: post #245

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Updated. Thank you for pointing me towards that as I was currently unaware.

Ok great. I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620865 and marked it off-topic.

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

#334

Post by Moter8 »

TheGRS wrote: post #290
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.

IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.

Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.

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

#335

Post by jv22222 »

untog wrote: post #311

This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…

Perhaps a company like open ai or some other company setup by all the players involved could run the analysis in cases like this.

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

#336

Post by adamsea »

jdietrich wrote: post #185
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 when someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of frict…

It's not unreasonable for there to an expectation of basically zero accidents of this nature during testing in cities. The public puts a huge amount of trust in private companies when they do this. And, pragmatically, Google, Uber, etc, all know that it would be horrible publicity for something like this to happen. One would think they'd be overly cautious and conservative to avoid even the possibility of this.

Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check.

You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."

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

#337

Post by astrodust »

gaius wrote: post #146
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.

The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

A similar story comes from World War II where an alarmingly high number of parachutes were failing to open when deployed. They started picking random chutes and their packer and sent them up for a test drop. The malfunction rate dropped to near zero.

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

#338

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Jagat wrote: post #168

Can we please not overreact and send the whole self-driving research down the drain? What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? When a million humans drive a car for a mile, and 1 of them results in a death, it's easy to pinpoint the blame on a "random drunk/distracted driver". How'bout start thi…

You know how sometimes you get a gut feeling or your awareness picks up somehow?

You experience it sometimes where you just happen to glance in the right direction, as a driver, and avoid horrible things from happening. Or hesitate to go through an intersection when a light turns green and some person is running a red. You and your body somehow knew but it can't be explained.

Computers don't have that, whatever it is.

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

#339

Post by roywiggins »

untog wrote: post #311

This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…

This sounds like something the NHTSA should do.

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

#340

Post by omarforgotpwd »

abalone wrote: post #292

This may not have been an unexpected circumstance. The "pedestrian outside of the crosswalk" report is likely wrong. There is visual evidence that strongly supports that this was a case of the Uber hitting a bicyclist while merging into the right turn lane. Here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle (note dent on the front right of the car): https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042 The sign it is lying nex…

Wow, that's really bad! Easy to see how the code didn't factor in the possibility of someone using the bike lane, which is a very bad look for Uber.
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