Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

Post by tedsanders » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

smallgovt wrote: post #111

Not to dismiss the tragedy of this incident, but it should be expected that self-driving cars kill pedestrians -- just at a rate lower than what's expected from human drivers. Perhaps there's a better metric to look at, but I'd like to see number of deaths caused per miles driven. If Uber's self-driving cars are killing more pedestrians than a human driver would, we have a huge problem, but I'd be willing to bet they…

Post by jessaustin » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #200

joering2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said that few times: how does any AI recognize whether object in front of me is just a white plastic bag rolling in the street, or a baby that rolled out of crib. AI cannot know and will never know. And we cannot have cars drive smoth in traffic if every self driven car will stop before hitting an empty plastic bag.

actually i slow down for plastic bags. And not because i care for their safety.

Post by adsfasdfsad111 » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #338

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…

Post by Piskvorrr » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #273

jdietrich wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car. As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.

Post by 0xfeba » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #77

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 have seen no evidence that any autonomous vehicle currently deployed can react faster than an alert and aware human. The commentariat tends to imagine that they can, and it's certainly plausible that they may eventually be. But I've never seen anyone official claim it, and the cars certainly don't drive as though they can quickly understand and respond to situations.